Well, as a German consumer, I gotta say it's pretty darn great to be able to pinpoint a website to an actual business. It's a good way to judge how legitimate an online shop is before ordering, for example; and if anything goes wrong, I know there is someone I can hold accountable.

> Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better.

I'm see a lot of "worse" in your comment and not seeing any "better". Can you give some examples of that?

I'd never heard of that imprint stuff but that's pretty Draconian yeah. If it will start being required for foreign sites I'll block all German IPs.

I avoid doing any business in Germany these days. I tried to get a VPS from Hetzner but they demanded a copy of my ID and didn't accept that I blanked out my citizen number. Which is actually recommended by our national police for identify theft risk.

I moved to Scaleway instead. Much better company.

Imprint is not needed everywhere in Europe. You need it in Germany, but you don't in the UK.

> need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore

And this is a bad thing why exactly ?!?!?!

If you respect your users data and right to privacy then you've got nothing to hide by publishing an EU compliant privacy policy.

It might be "just a small app", but I and many other people still very much still "do give a damn" about what the hell you do with my data, where you store it, how long you store it and how I can exercise my GDPR rights.

Have you been around at that time? NSA had recording boxes at ISP routing places, every few days guy would come to swap hdds. Most com was unencrypted. Or read about echolon...

This is exactly right. The new internet is analogous to cable television, but of course so much worse in many ways. The outrage and addiction are far worse, there are brand new privacy constraints, and of course it's controlled by powerful business interests with much more time and resources to pump into the problem than you have to fight it.

Yeah I think we're going to need something like tor soon, but with more mass market appeal. The internet as we know it is dying.

With the lack of encryption at that time I assume the NSA and similar agencies could read almost anything they wanted.

Yeah except he made multiple exceptions and justified them with "OK well I guess these can stay because they're better than what's available in Europe." So it's not exactly "I have my values and I'm sticking with them no matter what."

American company maliciously complying with the law, thinking they can get away with it? Never heard about such thing!

Jokes aside, the long arm of the law takes some time, it took us long time go get Apple to even allow alternative app stores. Eventually they'll get fined and actually start following the spirit of the regulations, but it'll take time as they try to drag it out as much as they can.

Why do you think entirely different countries and states with entirely different politics across Europe Canada and America all pushing the same policy coincidentally within the space of 6 months has anything to do with democracy.

It’s people being paid off and it’s obvious.

> Implying government discussions will be approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.

Don't get too much up in your arms about it, any topic about Europe and EU on HN ends up with huge swaths of American commentators seemingly willfully misunderstanding or spreading FUD in these comment threads.

You'll get used to it eventually, so you can identify what's the real criticism and worthwhile discussions, vs the easy trolling attempts.

Not only that but if you actually read the linked document it isn't calling for a VPN ban. It's a general report on what VPNs are and how they're perceived by various bodies. It does make reference to the UK Child Safety Commissioner's suggestion that they should be restricted to adult use only but it also talks about how essential they are for business etc. On the whole it's quite balanced and the existence of such a report seems very reasonable.

> its just a random idea someone wrote down.

It's a result from the "European Parliamentary Research Service", hosted on the official website of the European parliament. And it is fully inline with recent attempted and success legislation of the same parliament. I am not sure why you would call this a "random idea" and an established member of the Parliamentary Research Service as "someone".

The political systems of the USA and the EU are extremely dissimilar. The US, by virtue of their "winner takes it all" mentality, is evidently pretty vulnerable to a mad leader single-handedly destroying decades of progress. Whereas the EU isn't a single entity, but a federation of 27 member states without central leadership. There is no "EU government", and thus no single corruptible entity that could turn "insane".

> Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"?

Where did you try to find this? And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here? There are a bunch of contingencies already in place for economic instability both for individual members states and EU-wide, there is "Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union" in case there is one rogue member, and then each member state has a bunch of their own contingencies already too.

What exactly is missing here?

> There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").

I think you might severely misunderstand how decisions are made in EU, and also how regulations and such are actually implemented. I don't think there is any such assumptions at all, that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.

Where are you even getting these misconceptions from?