The Filing Cabinet Always Wins

You know, there was a fellow down at the hardware store — but he's gone now, like so many others. Had a system for everything. People would come in confused, and he'd say, "Back before you had to be smart, you just had to be organized." He meant it kindly, I think.

The European Union has fined Google nearly a billion euros. For what? For being too successful at what they're good at. Apparently, this is now a regulatory problem.

I don't have much love for Google. They know too much about too many people, and privacy used to mean something. But the EU's solution isn't to stop that. It's to fine them for it and call it a win. The fine goes into a government budget somewhere. Google stays Google. The system stays the same, just a little poorer.

This is what happens when you let government run your market. They don't fix the problem; they just tax the success you were worried about. At least when I was younger, if you didn't like how a company did business, you went somewhere else. Or you didn't. That was the whole system — let people choose. It was simple. It worked.

Now we've got algorithms and regulators both telling us what to do, and neither of them particularly well. The algorithms optimize for engagement, which makes people unhappy. The regulators respond by punishing the algorithm-makers, which doesn't make the algorithms any better — just more expensive.

Nothing here has anything to do with Google's customers actually wanting something different. Nothing here involves somebody, somewhere, doing something themselves. It's just bureaucracy punishing success and calling it progress.

In my day, we kept our data in a filing cabinet with a lock. You controlled who saw it. Simple. Earned. We didn't need regulators to fix it — we just didn't share what we didn't want shared.

But that required a kind of personal responsibility that seems out of fashion now. Easier to fine the company than to manage your own information, I suppose.

The EU will claim victory. Google will write a check. And somewhere, the hardware store man would just sigh.

— Bob