Pretty much all technologies have facets where markets break down and require some form of corrective regulation to make things work the way we want them to.
No! Nooooooo! Say it isn't so! The market is a magical infallible oracle of laissez-faire goodness! (That snidely said, the market is absolutely a marvellous thing in precisely the contexts where situations are so complex that centralized control is hopeless and only massively distributed decision making can hope to keep up. Again, context is everything.)
In which category do you think the question of how privacy should be managed between websites and their customers, across all kind of business models, all types of customers, and all sorts of data fit? A complex situation that needs context aware distributed decision, or a problem simple enough that regulation can unambiguously help?
Of course, there are actually a great number of questions, not just one. One of the biggest problems is that there is not enough knowledge in general society yet for markets to work well enough wrt privacy. One thing that lawmakers should be keenly aware of, is that broadly written regulations can be helpful at first, but then become burdensome in a mature market or in the face of technological change.
No! Nooooooo! Say it isn't so! The market is a magical infallible oracle of laissez-faire goodness! (That snidely said, the market is absolutely a marvellous thing in precisely the contexts where situations are so complex that centralized control is hopeless and only massively distributed decision making can hope to keep up. Again, context is everything.)