There's a fundamentally different definition of how laws are supposed to work. EU law isn't a list of checkboxes that you can technically check while going counter to the spirit, it is a philosophical direction, the details of following it are up to you. The spirit matters, not the letter.

> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...

If I was a business owner I’d rather operate under laws that don’t have highly ambiguous definitions of terms that introduces extra risk that is unnecessary in other places.

Unfortunately individual courts in some EU countries don’t care about the spirit but are fixated on the letter.

Right! Thanks for the link, I remembered reading that quote but couldn't find it. European regulators don't need hyper-specific definitions, because to them it's entirely normal to tell a company that they must do X or can't do Y even though the rules as written seem to authorize their current course of action Z.

All regulatory systems have some informal edge cases, of course. But Americans expect law to in general work more like a list of checkboxes and rely less on divining the regulator's intent. Indeed, that's one of the reasons why the regulatory environment under Trump is so frustrating to many of us; in the American view, there's supposed to be a strict distinction between what the law is and what the people at suchandsuch agency think the law is supposed to be or meant to achieve.