[F30]

Laws maybe, though these are set at the EU level (and one might argue about the greatness of GDPR).

Still, the rest of the EU (or at least Germany) is quite unhappy with the enforcement of these laws in Ireland. It is absurd that the Irish Data Protection Commissioner is supposed to control the privacy of most larger tech corporations for the whole EU. A few years ago, they only had 22 employees and their only office was literally co-located with a supermarket in the suburbs [1]. They got a second office since then and apparently are now at around 100 employees [2], but that is still quite small if you have to control giants like Google, Facebook and more.

So, from the outside it looks like Ireland's "strange relationships" also include privacy matters.

[1] https://www.gutjahr.biz/2012/07/facebook-eu-datenschutz/ [2] https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/press-releases/d...

[tpmx]

This stuff should be handled at a union level. Seems like low-hanging fruit to me.

As in: I don't think many EU citizens would object to having this being taken from the national level to the union level.

Create a single, strong EU data protection authority, placed somewhere in the union, after the typical competition. I'd suggest Sweden, but would also be happy with Denmark, Germany or the Netherlands.

[DavidHm]

No, but the Ireland government would surely object, because their cozy and soft relationship / taxes agreement with the tech giants is the only thing that's keeping them in Ireland.

[jkaptur]

I don’t know much about the EU - why is the physical location of the office important?

[anticensor]

San Marino would be the perfect place for European Data Protection Commission.

[rsynnott]

The Irish regulator has been more active than most, particularly in investigating multinationals. Overall, though, it's unfortunate that this is left up to national bodies; it should really be centralised.