[maximus1983]

The problem is any regulation is that it increases the startup costs for smaller businesses.

So as more regulation comes in it will just end up cementing the large players in place as they can absorb the costs of any regulation, while smaller businesses will have higher startup costs (which lets face it were next to nothing).

So while you maybe rejoicing now that shitty companies have gone for now, regulation will just make it harder for these massive companies to be toppled as it makes it harder for smaller companies to comply.

The EU are trying to have article 13 pushed through and any site that has user generated content will have to have some sort of upload filter to check for copyrighted content. That is going to cost money to implement and since Youtube hasn't really be able to achieve it, the only people that will be supplying the software will be the likes of Google, Microsoft etc ... So again it will just make it harder to the small business and help the large businesses.

Also a lot of these regulations make are making the web a shittier place. Every time I go onto a site now, I have the stupid cookie and GDPR notice plaster in front of what I want to look at. I already protect myself and don't care about their attempt to track me. It is just an irritation that nobody pays attention to and it achieves the opposite of what it was intended to achieve.

[lm28469]

We need regulations because people will go as far as they can to make more money. Businesses were upset when their country banned child labor while their concurrents' country didn't, same when weekends, vacations, reasonable work weeks were introduced. What about safety requirements, food quality inspections, &c.

Self regulating markets are a myth, just look at the US insurance and health industries if you want a proof.

That's also why in healthy countries you get a lot of free passes when you start a business: lower tax rate for a few years, 0% loans, advisors paid by the state, &c.

> regulation will just make it harder for these massive companies to be toppled as it makes it harder for smaller companies to comply.

Why did no one topple apple, amazon or google in the last 25 years? If anything the lack of regulations when they started allowed them to become the de facto monopolies we all know today.

[manigandham]

Some of those companies aren't even 25 years old. They didn't get toppled because they were the young upstarts growing into incumbents.

The problem isn't supporting privacy and data rights, it's doing so in a way that creates unintended consequences which actually worsen the market and UX for consumers. There are better ways this regulation could've been written, but it wasn't. That's the issue.

[oblio]

Legislation is not meant for you (at least for now).

It's meant for those who cannot/do not know how to protect themselves.

[MaxBarraclough]

I don't see how this answers the point.

I'm of the opinion that privacy regulation is a good idea, but it's trivially true that it's an additional burden for start-ups. The Is it worth it? question is a legitimate one.

[sprayk]

And now those who cannot/do not know how to protect themselves will be unable to start a business on the internet in the EU. Do you think these two groups have to be mutually exclusive?

[mattmanser]

[flagged]

[razius]

> but we're open about it and they can disable it if they want

It's not legal, consent is opt-in not opt-out.

[Isinlor]

There are no costs because no one is enforcing it.

> In one we actually track user's behaviour to make better recommendations, but we're open about it and they can disable it if they want.

If I understand well this is opt-out instead of opt-in... If you would be slapped some percent of your revenue for this you would feel the costs. Not only the cost of fine, but also of reading and implementing GDPR more carefully. But data protection authorities don't have enough resources to audit even 1 / 100 000 of companies that ignore GDPR up to this level of detail. So you can live in happy ignorance that you are implementing GDPR.

That not to say that GDPR doesn't help in general. The issue is that it will be a dead law or a law that hits randomly some very, very small percentage of companies breaking it.

Having a law that no one implements properly is just a recipe for abuse of power by authorities. "Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime" is well known to people living under the Soviet rule. (And, No! EU is not the Soviet Union. But some DPA are in post-soviet republics with people that were raised in this mentality.)

[maximus1983]

"I happen to know quite a lot about GDPR because I dealt with it at a client I was previously working with,"

There we go. You already done the time investment at someone else's expense. So thanks for proving my point.

My comments weren't about GDPR but about regulation in general. Any regulation requires more work which makes it difficult for smaller players. You had to do the extra work.

[CaptainZapp]

If your business model is scum I'd wager that it should die a slow and painful death.

I really don't see, why a scummy business should get a pass, just because it's a startup.

[maximus1983]

It hurts the non-scummy businesses as well.

So the regulation causes problems for people that haven't done anything wrong.

A lets be clear here. People aren't dying, it mostly ads and shitty data collection. I think it might be better to actually educate the public (which govs are doing) as to some of the pitfalls of the internet rather than regulating the crap out of it.

[iamaelephant]

> The problem is any regulation is that it increases the startup costs for smaller businesses.

Why should this be the one thing we optimise for?

[manigandham]

Where do you think jobs come from?

[Silhouette]

No-one seems to have suggested that it’s the one thing we should optimise for, but it is important. Small businesses are the foundation of economies, and every extra overhead ultimately damages those economies and so needs some justification that is of greater value, financial or otherwise. One year on, it’s still not clear to me that GDPR has achieved that greater good, and I write that as someone who is a very strong believer in stronger privacy laws in principle.

[Mirioron]

Because if you do poorly on the small business front, then they can't grow into bigger businesses. How many EU tech companies do you know of compared to American ones?