“Rent-Seeking Consultants, Inc.,” a subsidiary of the Strategies and Tactics to Annoy Neighbors (SATAN) Group, is pleased to announce its latest product for clients looking to exploit well-intentioned regulation to serve their own ends. Our new report, “Raising Rivals’ Costs Using the GDPR: A Strategic Guide to Thwarting Competition, Expanding Market Share & Enhancing Profits with Minimal Effort,” is available for immediate download for just $1,999 (discounted to just $999 for our loyal “Dante’s Ninth Circle” club members).
Over the last three decades, our experts at Rent-Seeking Consultants have dedicated themselves to the mission of advancing narrow interests at the expense of public welfare. We have done so by creatively exploiting laws and regulations that — while often implemented with the very best of intentions in mind — we recognized could be converted into a tool to advantage the few at the expense of the many.
Our motto: Where others see good intentions, we see good opportunities!
Our “Raising Rivals’ Costs Using the GDPR” report continues our latest line of new products, which aim to take Europe’s bold new privacy regulatory regime and convert it into a rent-seeker’s paradise. Our previous report outlined, “How to Pretend Compliance Costs Will Destroy Your Big Company, While Also Letting Your Shareholders Know It is Actually an Amazing Way to Crush the Competition.”
In our new report, we discuss how to weaponize the GDPR complaint process to your advantage. In this regard, some crowd-sourced efforts already exist, such as the “Ship Your Enemies GDPR” website. The site helps you take advantage of GDPR’s legal requirements by forcing rival firms to respond to as many frivolous claims as you can send their way. “We’ll help you send them a GDPR Data Access Request designed to waste as much of their time as possible,” the site notes.
More recently, angry gamers took to Reddit to devise a plan to use GDPR to harass gaming giant Blizzard. Fans were mad that Blizzard had kowtowed to the Chinese government by suspending a professional gamer who had voiced support for Hong Kong protestors. In essence, the Reddit protestors hope to use the GDPR to generate the equivalent of a DDOS attack on a company through massive, coordinated data requests. Brilliant!
We admire the spirit of these ingenious initiatives, but we aim to more fully capture the value associated with them for our clients using concerted manipulation of whatever political levers we can help you pull. How? Weaponizing complaint processes is a tactic that Rent-Seeking Consultants, Inc. has used effectively in the past. When a small handful of censorial-minded folks wanted to get the Federal Communications Commission to beef up fines and penalties for broadcast “indecency,” we helped them stuff the ballot box at the agency with form letters and fake complaints to make regulators believe the public was clamoring for greater censorship, when it reality it was just serving a very small group of people who wanted a heckler’s veto over broadcast programming. We tied those broadcasters up in courts for years with these tactics! Meanwhile, the new media operators we also represented were able to race ahead with whatever content they wanted to post on their platforms. Victory!
This led to the creation of our Scaring Consumers Really Effectively While Earning Money (SCREWEM™) initiative, which eventually won the prestigious Lobbying Award for Manipulating Effectively (LAME) Award in the “Creating Needless Panic” category. Our latest report highlights how we can use that same SCREWEM™ system to whip up serious privacy-related troubles for your rivals using the GDPR complaint process — all while pretending that this is all in the public interest.
We hope you will consider ordering our new report, and please let us know what we can do to help our trusted clients take advantage of well-intentioned regulation to undermine the public good on an ongoing basis. Finally, with California set to impose costly new privacy mandates extraterritorially on the entire nation, you can count on us being in touch again soon about exciting new opportunities for raising rivals’ costs using the machinery of the State.
Sincerely,
I.M. Prehensile
Director of Strategic Political Exploits for S.A.T.A.N.
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[This has been an act of satire, but the unintended consequences of GDPR are quite real. For some hard facts about what GDPR has meant in practice, see: Alec Stapp, “GDPR after One Year: Costs and Unintended Consequences,” and Eline Chivot and Daniel Castro, “What the Evidence Shows About the Impact of the GDPR After One Year.” More generally, see: “Tech Policy, Unintended Consequences & the Failure of Good Intentions.”]
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