Well, yeah, they were written to prevent at least some of the privacy abuse from those big tech companies, not to get rid of them. Sometimes the answer is more rules, such as rules protecting smaller businesses while continuing to place regulatory burdens on the tech giants, who are responsible for the most egregious invasions of privacy.

Exactly this. As a recent example, the documents for the new Online Safety Act in the UK are over 2400 pages long! That means that even small businesses that want to comply have no reasonable option other than relying on summaries, and the regulator and big businesses will probably just negotiate on what the details actually mean in practice anyway.

I understand that there's nuance when dealing with all the edge cases to regulations. But it seems that the answer should not be extending the regulations to insane lengths to try to cover everything. That way lies insanity.

Well, compliance itself is costly, but the cost is stuff that society decided it wanted to spend money on.

But uncertainty in compliance and time spent navigating compliance is nearly pure waste.

HAHAHAHA good joke. Oh wait. You're serious. Oh god please no.

I second this; I have never been "into" these problematics and as a user I generally just disallow everything I can, which can be a pain (I mean I do want to often don't store anything when I'm browsing the web, which leads to meeting a lot of "cookie banners"). While there are probably browser extensions that can perform the automatic opt-out, it would be nice if browsers provided an API as an unified and centralized way to communicate consentment as a set of privilege access to different browser features and APIs (you could e.g. forbid the use of canvas, or even JS entirely).

But that's only a small part of a huge legal frame, and as I said I don't know much about these problematics.

Do Not Track was a spectacular failure.

You can still turn cookies off in your user agent though.

I just don't see the issue. The GDPR isn't exactly difficult to comply with, nor does it hamper any of the clear successes of the last 25 years outside of the ad industry. What's the benefit of backing out on it? Is this just an effort to make a homegrown surveillance network?

Politicians don’t need to know the details, they need to be advised by competent people with the best interests of the public in mind. Which may sound straightforward while being really difficult to get right.

> I don't see anything about GDPR that would harm innovation or long-term success for europe.

It's the same thing as any other regulation -- regulatory burden. Laws aren't code, they need interpretation. That means you need your own lawyer to tell you an interpretation that they feel they can defend in front of a judge.

There is a cost to that. In both time and money. I am the CEO of a startup who is subject to GDPR. The amount of time and money we've spent just making sure we are in compliance is quite high, and we barely operate in Europe and don't collect PII.

You can wing it and say "this looks easy, I can do this on my own!" and maybe you can. For a while. But no serious business is going to try to DIY any regulations.

Not different rules for different people.

You would be subject to one rule for your small company and another rule as it grows.

This is everywhere in society, from expectation difference between babies, kids, teenagers, adults and seniors and to tax bracket structures.

The problem is that an intellectually consistent position of being against "different rules for different people" means everywhere, in everything.

For instance, poor people should not have any tax breaks: everyone should pay exactly the same percentage of their income, like 15% all across the board or whatever.

Such ideas often have regressive effects.

However, I get it. When it comes to handling personal information, you simply can't say that the "little guys" don't have to follow all the rules, and can cheerfully mishandle personal information in some way.

Small operators have simpler structures and information systems; it should be easier for them to comply and show compliance, you would think (and maybe some of the requirements in the area can be simplified rather than rules waived.)

Almost any corporate rule I am aware of has differences in how they apply depending on the size of the company. And as an entrepreneur and startup consultant I think that is a good principle. I don’t even see how society could function without it.

>Different rules for different people huh?

That’s how efficient market works. The bigger are the players, the higher are the chances they will distort the market. You need to apply the force proportional to size to return market back to equilibrium at maximum performance. We have anti-trust laws for this reason, so nothing new, nothing special.

Regulation is a moat designed by and benefitting big corporations. Removing it for small businesses specifically would actually be fair.

In literally no place in the world are the rules the same for running a multinational or running a lemonade stand. I feel this should be obvious.

I think most people agree that the state should be subject to harsher rules than you are, because it is large and powerful.

But you would actually prefer to be subject to the same rules as the state? I.e. typically nothing which isn't explicitly allowed is forbidden for you to do, you are forced to hand out copies of documents you produce, and so on?

> Different rules for different people huh?

Compliance has fixed costs. And smaller operations have a smaller blast radius when things go wrong. Reducing requirements for smaller operators makes sense.

It could, however, be good policy independent of personal preference.

I like folks who have to work for a living and dislike billionaires relaxing on yachts bought on their generational wealth, but in addition sociology metrics of the United States in the past 100 years suggest that the highest levels of happiness correlated pretty heavily with marginal tax rates as high as 100% based on wealth.

What makes you think it's LLM generated?