From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
Even "taking their part of the money out" is not guaranteed. Again, it's a privately traded company, so there's no open market. You have to find someone willing to buy your shares from you and make a deal with them.
but the opposite is true too: don't take money from investors unless they let you keep control of your company. for every case like this there are probably a dozen cases where investors took control of a company and ruined it for the sake of making money.
Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted. This is the principal-agent problem at work.
> Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted
Presumably, the real world is a bit more nuanced than that.
There is no reason why you cannot run a company for different motivations than "get as rich as possible" while still accepting investments from people whose sole motivation is "get as rich as possible". While difficult, it is possible to align people even when they have different motivations.
What you are describing is exactly the principal-agent problem, and it is a real problem at startups when a founder is truly motivated by something that the investors don't care about. You can run a company with different motivations than your investors, but only so long as you return the goods they want. If they see you not returning the goods and not caring about that fact, they will try to replace you. They will try to do that a lot faster if you demonstrate that you don't care about giving them a return than if you show that you do care.
Conversely, investors can be mission-driven or otherwise aligned with you on something other than "maximize my return," but those investors rarely give you the best price.
I remember that fondly, that was the time period when I first got online and made my own GeoCities page. I first learned HTML from a page in the Athens neighborhood, on lot 2090. 30 years and I still have that address memorized.
I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
2022 was before the end of the ZIRP free money train (the one that let most companies we know and love "acquire customers" by just loss-leadering everything against 0% loans sort of thing) at least i think my timeline is consistent internally. Either way, those days are over for now.
when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something
A date picker widget I tossed on NPM 13 years ago gets 32,000 downloads per week. 510 a week is background activity, that's indexing bots or one org's CI system.
I totally agree. I thought about adding a paragraph about how it seems like even oracle themself doesn’t use it on production (cause otherwise it’d have probably more downloads due to developers, CI, you name it) but it is possible they use a internal npm proxy with a cache.
Anyway it’s laughable that this package is the reason they base their argument on.
Confinity is the company that developed the PayPal website that survived that merger. Elon Musk was not on the Confinity side, he was trying to pivot his x.com bank into a PayPal clone and buy users ($30 per signup) faster than them until they merged to avoid running each other out of cash. The two startups were operating out of the same building at the time. After the merger, Musk was named CEO but ousted from the company just 5 months later, in part for being absent much of the time (including at the time of his firing), and in part because the PayPal engineers had circulated a petition to the board asking them to remove him. The board agreed.
Co-founder is just a marketing name and has no meaning in reality, actions do. Looking at this he provided in money which was likely to ruin his business by overspending it and greater minds prevailed in the end (I'm not saying paypal is a good thing or not). Why they made him CEO I cannot fathem but it has probably something to do with the bullying behaviour he is known for.
I've been named co-founder once but as soon as its usefulness ran out it got removed from the website (nothing else changed).
> "While 5 CFR 315 does permit immediate termination, it does not permit arbitrary termination. The termination must be related to unsatisfactory performance or conduct (section 804) or conditions arising before employment, which usually means something from your background investigation (section 805)..."
I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give Shopify a 15%+ share of all associated revenue.
He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.
Lots of executives at big companies can be petty though, it's nothing new when one is in power and surrounds themselves with yes men. It doesn't mean they're necessarily having a breakdown at all.
What you've observed, quite accurately, is that our bar for emotional intelligence when it comes to corporate executives is the same that we expect from ten-year olds.
Engaging with reality as directly as possible is important in business. Emotions are a part of reality, usually a signal about social dynamics.
At the higher levels of serious companies — by which I mean ones trying to win in the market, regardless of size - managers and executives regularly receive training about this.
I can’t say more because this is my alt, but: “executives are childish”, “executives are psychopaths”, etc. are very common, often incorrect narratives. If anything executives should be straightforward and simple.
To return to topic: something is going seriously sideways with Matt, and I wish him the best.
> wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves
At minimum they contribute Advanced Custom Fields, one of the most heavily used plugins. I make no judgement on if they contribute enough, but it's not like they give zero back to the ecosystem.
I don't recall voicing an opinion either way. In fact I specifically said I don't know if it's enough, but saying they contribute nothing is factually incorrect. And no lack of contribution would justify taking over ACF in what is essentially a supply chain attack like they did.
The contribute to the ecosystem, a little to the WP code, but use for free the services that Automattic provides.
It's the services that they got cut-off from. They are separate things that to the layman are seen as "wordpress".
> I don't recall voicing an opinion
Well, you mention they contribute to the ecosystem. If it is not your supply chain, you cannot dictate how it is run. You call it an attach, they call it a commercial endeavour.
If "free code" being resold is the issue, then Matt's eve worse of a freeloader, since most of the code in WordPress was provided for free by people not employed by Matt.
Matt's a known liar, and that 4000/hours a week includes a lot of stuff that doesn't involve working on code. (For example, Matt is including time spent censoring the WP forums, and harassing event sponsors in that time.) Given that the bulk of the WordPress team quit last year, I'd be surprised if they're even spending a 100 hours/week as a company right now on anything related to code right now.
But if we're going by hours...the WP Community as a whole probably spent several hundred thousand hours on maintaining or improving WP last week.
The staff that quit was the staff that worked on WP. Almost none of the remaining employees worked on it, so yeah I would not be surprised if only 4 people are working on it now and that's the real cause of Matt pulling back on their WP work.
I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?
I'll be honest: I think it's pretty funny, and I think matt probably agrees. Also, as others mention, it's much easier/faster then removing the field and column and validation, yes.
No reasonable developer, given the requirement “remove this checkbox as required by a court order”, would respond by changing it to “I love pineapple on pizza”. There are so many other things that could be possibly done instead: just remove it, hide it with CSS, change it to a “<input type=hidden />”, or change the text to “please check the box” if it was really so hard to remove. I can’t imagine any lone developer or product manager being so petty that they would risk their job to spite a court order. The checkbox is only there because someone higher up wants it to be there.
Lol, this is like every bad stereotype about the general quality of WordPress websites: "Getting rid of a checkbox is too technically complicated, so let's just change the text instead to something completely nonsensical."
I actually find your explanation even less believable than this being a symptom of a crazy person (which I don't necessarily believe it is either).
You can easily verify this wasn't the case by checking archive.is and seeing that the checkbox was removed for a day before the new one was added or checking stories and comments on what happened or looking at the commit history since the repository is open source.
If there were no facts in evidence, it your alternate possibility would still not be plausible since there's no reason the person wouldn't hide the checkbox if they didn't want to delete it but there's also no reason not to just delete it since removing it from the client is as much of a code change as changing the text.
The WPEngine checkbox was removed late in the week, and replaced with the pineapple question after the weekend.
Developers on WordPress.org have stated that the value was not stored, and still is not stored. Matt also said he didn't care if you checked it or not.
WordPress isn't as legacy as those platforms for whom "too hard to change the functionality, just change the text" is common.
That's likely to corrupt the database backend, which now appears to store old "non WP Engine" affirmations in the same ___location as new "pineapple pizza" affirmations. How will they be able to distinguish?
You're assuming they actually care to distinguish. But real answer, barring a brief period where some users may get a cached version, they can likely just use the date of change to determine before and after if necessary.
not only would i say this is a possible explanation, i would say it is the obvious explanation - and pretty ridiculous to accuse someone of having a mental breakdown based on this
One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to take a strategy like this.
I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole, content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling is.
People keep saying this but I haven't noticed any drops in quality. The default subs have always been bad, and the niche subs continue to be good, in my experience. Do you have any specific examples?
As someone who has been ingesting a high volume of reddit "content" for the better part of 3 years - the spam/bot problem is _wild_.
I've implemented a handful of methods to detect 'networks' of these bots/spammers/karma farming accounts and, from the subreddits I'm monitoring, it's _more than half_ of the total accounts posting to them. This is across subreddits of all types, sizes and topics. Massive subs, regional subs, local subs, they're all completely inundated with these accounts - and these are the ones that make it through Reddit's own spam detection and whatever each subreddit has in place to handle moderation. These are the posts that do go public, more than half of the _accounts_ I've determined are spam/karma farming/bots. It's an even greater proportion of the _posts_ that belong to these accounts. (Thus, there are more spammers than "real" users, and they're posting more than the "real" users)
And this is with rather elementary methods of determining "spam" from "real" users/content. Those spammers who aren't being very lazy can pretty easily slide through my filters. (I'm detecting 'duplicates' of images and post titles/account descriptions using perceptual hash/simhash and hamming distance only - I'm rolling out text/image vector embedding based duplicate detection now and the numbers are even worse with this in place but I don't have it properly tuned yet) They're literally just re-posting the same content that successful/high karma accounts have previously posted en masse across as many subreddits as they can find/aren't banned from and it's wildly effective.
What's crazy to me is that many of them are in the 6 and 7 digits of karma - obviously spam accounts with > 1,000,000 karma is wild.
It seems to me that Reddit has zero interest in controlling this. Some might argue this is confirmed by the lack of moderation tools available to subreddit mods (which was ultimately the motivation of me building this system - but when they changed the API stuff I changed my goals/intention with it).
Reddit has been user hostile since 2014. It's just that as long as you hurt one part of the community the other parts hate you're fine.
The mods are universally hated on reddit and they were the ones most impacted by the changes. The average user either didn't notice or stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.
> The average user... stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.
Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it. /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of /r/Israel.[2]
What's weird is the subs that will ban you for simply commenting in another sub, especially for just one comment, even if your comments are contrary to the theme of the sub.
When r/thedonald was around, I would debate misconceptions americans had about politics in Denmark from time to time (no we're not socialist). And of course I would get banned left and right (but mostly left), and would get the "you post in thedonald, ergo I win"-line regularly.
Reddit was a trash heap then, and it's gotten exponentially worse since. Why anyone go there voluntarily is beyond me. It contains nothing of value.
If you like British panel shows (or any version of taskmaster) then /r/panelshow is pretty great. Not much chatter, but then again, maybe that's part of the appeal lol.
That subreddit could basically not be further from the ones I frequent. There are some ok cycling ones, relatively low traffic, not many people, good content - and especially not only typical computer nerds.
Let’s be super clear, [2] does not ban the user for being Jewish as per [1] claims.
There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It is clearly spelt out in the terms.
“You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other subreddits and spreads
propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism.”
Personally I don’t use Reddit that much, so I can speak to if this statement is true or not, the mods however do think it is.
There's no other nationality in the world where commenting in the subreddit devoted to that country results in being automatically banned from other subreddits.
I am not surprised. With the amount of misinformation that is produced and disseminated from the highest levels of israeli society. See my other posts on
1) Zionism = racist / supremacist ideology
2) misinformation
3) links to a documentary demonstrating how people are being awakened to the truth (and how they realise they have been lied to) Israelism film on YouTube
4) psyops campaigns both against their own citizens , and Americans etc.
Russia does all of the things you’re alluding to at arguably a much greater scale.
Also as you’ve outlined, plenty of the misinformation is targeted at Israeli citizens themselves and banning those people from the opportunity to engage outside of their bubble makes no logical or moral sense
Point noted. I should have prefixed it with zionist Israelis.
There are Israelis that have been awakened to the truth (see BT Salem, Ilan Pappe milo peled etc)
Also many former American Jewish Zionists [1] see Israelism film. You can also watch this to understand how these ideas and misinformation is propagated at an industrial scale.
You will note I clearly specified Zionist , which is an inherently racist/supremicist ideology. Akin to aparthied in South Africa.
Yes, when you say things that sound like Hitler, I will tell you that you sound like Hitler. I’m not clicking any of your stupid links or engaging with you.
However, I know a lot of South Africans and will be sure to warn them away from your company.
Another is: ecosystem partners are often surprised what users actually value. We all like to think that our contributions are critical, but the Reddit example shows a huge disconnect between the value 3P partners thought they were delivering and what users actually valued.
You're making it sound like Reddit was unusable without API/client in the past though. I'd never used a Reddit client before I started using it at all on mobile. I bet a good chunk of users (esp casually browsing, or frequenting exactly one niche subreddit) just used the web.
Not saying it wasn't user hostile or sucked, it just doesn't match the experience I had (or when I talked to some people).
I've found that the API changes improved the subreddits I was in because it made it harder for spambots to operate. Reddit got away with the changes because ultimately the power users were a tiny fraction of its userbase, and they were using clients that hid the ads so Reddit wasn't making any money from them so Reddit didn't care about their wants.
Reddit is not GPL so while hostile it’s incomparable to WordPress core. The user base of Reddit would have to rewrite from scratch. Wordpress can and will be forked if it comes to it. There are enough businesses relying on it that it would be worth it to re govern it under an alternate name.
I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1 website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on docker, digital ocean and so on…
Pressable includes support, global caching, and a bunch of other things you won't get on a $5/month VPS. Also not everyone wants to play system administrator 7 days a week to keep their server from getting hijacked or nuked.
So they throw Cloudflare in front of it and get defaced yearly. I've worked for companies (thankfully not in a position dealing with the website) that did just that. Somehow they're even still around a decade later. To be fair though that was actually Bluehost, not a VPS.
True, but shared hosting providers (like hostinger) offers basically the same, but for cheaper and no pricing per website, even on cheaper plans you can fit five or more sites in.
Of course, it doesn't matter in the end - as long as users have ability to choose a hosting there will be cheaper and "better" options. Shopyfing wordpress would be worse...
There’s value to users in using a service that’s the same as the software. Trust is worth it to consumers. It’s why many still prefer to take their cars to the dealer rather than an Indy shop
I've had 3 cars totaled by dealers and none totaled by indy shops. One was actually messed up by them beyond repair. One was messed up and they wanted more to fix it well beyond the replace cost. The final one just wanted well beyond the replace cost, and I got it fixed for much much less at an indy shop.
Just find a good indy shop. there's a great one 2 blocks from my house at a gas station. discusses all repairs with you, good on preventive maintenance, 1/4 the price of a dealer. Will tell you what repairs you actually need to do and what you don't. Also easier to schedule and pick up and drop off. I have to wait at the mega dealer near me like 15-30 minutes at drop off and pick up. At least the toyota one will let you defer your car wash instead of waiting for it longer. At the gas station I drop the car in the lot and drop the keys in a mailbox. For pickup I go in any day till 10 and pay like I'm buying an energy drink, grab the keys and walk out to the lot to grab it.
That implies you need to dedicate the 5 bucks a month per instance, when you look at how much things are write once and cacheable as heck, you could easily get customers down to pennies per instance per month.
You may be right. Come to think of it, until this drama, the only "community" I believed exists around Wordpress is the network of small businesses specialized in Wordpress hosting, maintenance and consulting for other small businesses. I personally know someone running a sole proprietorship, whose entire income over past ~decade came from such Wordpress jobs.
It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.
The only interaction i have with wordpress is sleazy small consultancies selling it to clueless mgmt as the magic solution to all their problems. I really have never had a positive impression of wordpress due to this.
I can't even remember all the times I've been suckerpunched with "hey we hired these people to implement <magic wordpress> and its not going so well. They tell us its because our systems are bad and our employees are not doing things right. Can you get with them and see what the <Insert Manager speak for blames you> seems to be....?
ME: The problem is they are some hack shop that "sold you" and bit off more than they could chew and they also don't have a clue about systems integrations.
MGMT: Nope the problem is our employees that have been working here getting "Exceeds expectations" on reviews that are the problem. We have no explanation for why though... So we are hiring McKinsey to come in and do a department evaluation to find out.
One thing to keep in mind, WordPress being open source was an afterthought. It inherited a GPL from b2/cafelog.
If Matt woke up one morning and decided he wanted to make WordPress closed source, he couldn't. But what he could do is force everyone to pay a license fee for the name, and anyone who did not pay he publicly makes hell for them. You could also pretend to encourage them to fork, knowing full well they would be bound by a GPL just like him.
This is actually a very successful business strategy and even has a name: racketeering.
He drives the project long enough that probably no b2 code remains. He could have prepared and take a contributor agreement or some other measures to allow relicensing.
Question however is, whether auch a scheme would have made WordPress successful, or if it thrives from the community, where many assumed that everybody plays on the same field via GPL.
He can also just stop open sourcing his company's work on the product. WordPress is GPL, not AGPL, so they can make any changes you want and use them on Automattic's platforms without ever releasing code to the community again.
I don't understand your point about forking, yes they'd have the GPL but so what? They can control their fork from then on, it doesn't matter if they have to continue open sourcing contributions, in fact it'd be preferable to whatever Matt is doing.
I think you underestimate the work it takes to maintain and more importantly grow such a large open source project. If wp engine can barely contribute today, what are the chances they want to take on the whole thing. Nope they just want to get rich off open source. That's understandable , they are a for profit after all. But at what point does it make sense to give back in terms of either money or time to make improvements to the ecosystem that you depend on.
I agree with Matt's ideals but not the actions. The reality is theres not a whole lot he can do without looking like spoilt kid taking his ball away from the game.
There is no “we” here. It’s a man making arbitrary decisions about pineapple on pizza. There is no plan and the watch and drawn out nature is indicative of someone reacting to events rather than implementing a plan.
I have 20 years in WP and B2. This is tragic. He needs to be removed or the platform will die making a huge repository of knowledge valueless.
Eh. Aquia tried a similar stunt with Drupal (centralize all the tings at the community's expense) and that hasn't exactly been a rousing success. I don't have a great feel for how dependent upon the larger dev community the WordPress ecosystem is so maybe it'll work for them?
I would hope that this would cause more people to realize that allowing total control of the things you use to be centralized in one person (or business) is bad, but well... quite similar things have happened to plenty of other open source projects before.
That's not what "rent seeking" means. Rent seeking is the term for manipulating institutions, customs or laws for the purpose of extracting money without creating anything.
I think the distinction is generally about not creating anything that's broadly useful, putting up a tollbooth but then not using any of the collected toll to improve the road, say. [1]
the reason the rent seeking concept isn’t popular in contemporary classical economics (beyond the partisan association) is that it is pretty ill-defined.
but i think you would be hard pressed to find a scenario where Automattic is the rent-seeker and WP engine is not, given that Automattic both contributed to WP and is actively using their revenue to improve WP, whereas WP engine… isn’t.
Didn't WPE release some of the most popular WP plugins of all time? Advanced Form Fields etc? How is that not contributing to the ecosystem?
I'm not sure it's logically consistent to attack the phrase "rent seeeking" as unclear, then apply it anyway (?!) but muddle the word "contributing" in turn, to reach pre-desired conclusions about which party is at fault. You'll have to clarify for me what branch of neo-classical economics is concerned with assigning fault. Seems entirely removed from economics for me.
More broadly, we're not discussing any of this in the context of "contemporary classical economics" (ie right of centre economics), so I have no idea why you think we'd agree on using those definitions, or why those definitions have pride of place over any others.
The term is 100 years old and was created to refer to everything after WWI. I don't think people using the term would actually subscribe to the idea that human development under capitalism peaked in the 1910s.
Furthermore, the entire concept was developed as a justification for the Nazi party and their economic ideas. Which I think is justification enough that people should stay away from lazy, doomy political tropes.
Don't argue with me about definitions, I'm trying to explain what I think the GP meant and why `the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation` is incorrect.
Capitalism-imperialism: a system based on endless growth and expansionism, where the proletariat in the imperial core is pacified by the crumbs the capitalist give it from the plunder of the colonies; the crumbs also allow the proletariat to buy the goods and services, thus maintaining demand, sort of.
Late stage capitalism-imperialism: the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed, there is nowhere left to expand, except inward, so the capitalists start cannibalizing the proletariat in the imperial core by giving it less and less crumbs, in order to achieve even higher rates of profit; to remain in power, while the masses see their quality of life decline / starve, they need to consolidate more and more power. More than the absolute monarchs ever had.
> the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed
that same sentence canNOT be used to describe any human endeavor in any other epoch. We are in the anthropocene now.
okay sure, going back and forth on definitions is boring.
I just disagree that late stage capitalism imperialism is where we're at. It's not true for the US, or the west or the globe.
Yes we're in the anthropocene, and while that phrase has a negative implication nowadays, it is not true that anthropocene means "low hanging resources" have been consumed leading to uncontrolled rent seeking. It is no more true than a barracuda lurking in a coral is an out of control rent seeker. That's just the nature of barracudas.
We spent most of the last 70-years doing a pretty good job of aggressively sabotaging and suppressing any efforts to develop alternative economic systems. Even the few successes one might claim for communism are largely dependent on some kind of concession to allow for capitalism in limited areas. This doesn’t necessarily mean that capitalism is inherently superior, it’s just dominant.
The problem as I see it isn’t simply capitalism=bad, it has produced the greatest expansion of wealth in history after all, but rather it’s just not equipped to be the answer for everything. There are problems and opportunities that exist where capitalism does not have a solution for. Things like healthcare, equitable wealth distribution, and environmental sustainability are the obvious examples that come to mind.
These false dichotomies and unnecessarily tribalistic positions where pure devotion to free market capitalism is demanded are hobbling American society and its ability to maintain stability and take care of its citizens, since every attempt to suggest that some industries should be at least partially socialized, or even mildly regulated, are met with demagoguery and fear mongering. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening here, I am speaking in broad terms.
> These false dichotomies and unnecessarily tribalistic positions where pure devotion to free market capitalism is demanded are hobbling American society and its ability to maintain stability and take care of its citizens, since every attempt to suggest that some industries should be at least partially socialized, or even mildly regulated, are met with demagoguery and fear mongering.
The trouble here is that this is a misunderstanding of what free markets are supposed to be.
The idea of a free market is, if you have an oligopoly which is charging high margins and ripping people off, do you a) break up the cartel and restore competition in order to bring down margins, or b) impose price controls or otherwise regulate the oligopoly while leaving it intact. The premise of free markets is that you do the first one and not the second one.
The problem we have is that you often have one party saying "don't do either of them" and the other party saying "do the second one" and then the first one doesn't happen even though it's the thing you want. The premise here is free market competition, not free market monopolization.
You have a different problem with things like pollution. That isn't something markets are expected to solve, in the same way as you don't expect them to prevent theft or homicide. The problem then is, how do you solve the problem? "Have the government do it" is under-specified. The Soviet Union did not have a sterling environmental record. Outcomes and efficiency both matter, so you can't just give it to some unaccountable bureaucrats or they'll simultaneously drive up the cost of everything with red tape, fail to prevent the pollution, and get captured by incumbents who use the red tape to lock out competitors. So how do you apply competitive pressure to politicians? Maybe change the voting system, e.g. use approval/score/STAR instead of first past the post so you can have more than two viable political parties. Or stop trying to do everything federally and hand more back to the states, so we can have back the laboratories of democracy and have 50 chances to find the right balance instead of just one.
I just got rid of my 2013 Microsoft Surface Pro. It was still being used daily in my workshop, 11 years old. Core i5 processor, running Windows 10. I only got rid of it because the battery decided to become a spicy pillow one night, expanding until it cracked open the case and pushed out most of the touchscreen.
You can filter this list to see 200+ GDPR fines assigned to sole proprietors, the smallest of small businesses, individuals that haven't even registered a separate entity for their business:
They're only cataloging the (2500+) publicly known ones, most of which have a link to a news article. As an example: some guy in Croatia emailed a couple websites he thought might be interested in his marketing services, and provided a working opt-out link in his cold emails. One of them reported the email to the Italian Data Protection Authority who then put him through an international investigation and fined him 5000 euro.
"Assuming here that the reasons expressed in the aforementioned document have been fully recalled, [individual] was charged with violating articles 5, par. 1, letter a), 6, par. 1, letter a) of the Regulation and art. 130 of the Code, since the sending of promotional communications via e-mail was found to have been carried out without the consent of the interested parties. Therefore, it is believed that - based on the set of elements indicated above - the administrative sanction of payment of a sum of €5,000.00 (five thousand) equal to 0.025% of the maximum statutory sanction of €20 million should be applied."
It's worth noting that each country has a different approach to GDPR enforcement (which arguably defeats the point of it but that's another discussion).
The UK tends to be a lot more (IMO) reasonable in its approach than some other European countries. Italy tends to be one of the strictest, and likes to hand out fines, even to private individuals for things like having a doorbell camera. The UK has only fined one person on that basis, and it was more of a harassment case rather than just simply that they had a camera.
ICO and Ofcom aren't generally in the business of dishing out fines unless it's quite obviously warranted.
To clarify, I'm not interested in this, because it doesn't answer the question at all. I don't want a Googled answer, I want personal experience.
For instance, I know of a company that flouted GDPR and got multiple letters off the ICO trying to help them with compliance before finally, months later, they ended up in court and got a very small fine.
Edit: it is not cool to edit your post after I replied to make it look more reasonable
