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Comment by TheRealPomax | Hacker News Reader

Except not quite: while the UK will have laws that effectively mirror the GDPR, the crucial difference is that it's now a UK law, not a European law, and there is no EU enforcement of that UK law.

UK citizens also won't be able to appeal all the way up the EU courts: it stops at the UK supreme court.

And most importantly: now that the UK is out of the EU, it is a tiny, barely relevant factor in multinational corporate online practice. Any business that gets told by the UK to follow their GDPR can quite comfortably go "lol, no" and barely affect their bottom line, as opposed to having the entire EU block go "obey our GDPR or we won't let you do business in any of these 27 nations, a large portion of which make up a substantial cut of your global revenue".

The biggest players won't, of course, but smaller companies?

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The 3rd biggest online market is barely a blip? And probably the 2nd biggest for the US because of the shared language.

Poorly informed comments like this pop up a lot, they don't understand the reality of just how big the UK economy is compared to the vast majority of coutnries that make up the EU.

The UK was 20% of the EU's GDP, 1/5th of the total GDP out of 27 countries.

They probably pop up a lot because they're the result of people being actively misinformed. The UK press has been pushing this narrative about the UK being a tiny, irrelevant backwater of the EU hard ever since the referendum was announced. It's certainly not the only way they've lead people astray either.

It’s interesting how much the press of the US and U.K. push the narrative that the UK, respectively, are terrible.

The EU+UK combined is about the same size as the USA. No EU country alone is a world player any more, that’s basically the entire reason everyone got together to negotiate trade issues as a block.

I agree with you that the language barrier is stop going to be at least somewhat important.

I guess it depends on your definition of a "world player". By GDP, it goes something like US, EU, China, Japan, India, UK, Brazil, Canada, Russia, South Korea, Australia. There's a fairly large gap (more than double) between Japan and China.

Obviously exact orders will depend on the estimate and how fair it is to use 2019 figures and then subtract the UK from them.

But however you slice it, the UK is not pocket change. Maybe smaller companies can ignore all but the largest three, but I doubt it.

It's more likely that the UK will prefer a more liberal market, and for that reason their laws will be a little ignored - they won't enforce them and will forever be planning their repeal even if they never quite get there.

> I guess it depends on your definition of a "world player”

Fair. I mean in the sense of being influential enough to set the rules, standards, and norms.

> Maybe smaller companies can ignore all but the largest three, but I doubt it.

I guess the logical question is: How many companies ignore the Japanese or Indian markets?

GDP rankings are as follows from the last posted results (2018):

  1) United States 20,544,343.46
  2) China 13,608,151.86
  3) Japan 4,971,323.08
  4) Germany 3,947,620.16
  5) United Kingdom 2,855,296.73
  6) France 2,777,535.24
  7) India 2,718,732.23
  8) Italy 2,083,864.26
  9) Brazil 1,868,626.09
  10) Canada 1,713,341.70

So out of "EU" it's only Germany which was larger according to those figures (from the World Bank).

Of course things will have changed over the last couple of years, but I doubt it is substantially different in terms of order.

UK's been ping-ponging between 5th and 7th due to the pound fluctuations.

In reality the EU is not a unified market for e-commerce because of the language barriers and very large discrepancies in laws. For example, France has some pretty crazy stuff to protect the French language, Germany is very strict about certain subjects and the denial of them like the holocaust. And while there are some top level EU laws or efforts to police the bigger internet players, enforcement is still mainly regional too.

I'm under no pretensions that the UK is far, far from the super-power status of the US or now China, or previously USSR.

But if we're a blip, most countries in the world aren't even a notch.

> But if we're a blip, most countries in the world aren't even a notch.

That is the impression I’ve been getting from what economists have been saying. Of course, not being in economist myself, there is no way for me to tell if I’m reading real economists or merely people wearing economist clothing.

> And most importantly: now that the UK is out of the EU, it is a tiny, barely relevant factor in multinational corporate online practice.

California emissions standards for automobiles dictate how cars are made for the entire USA. The UK has almost double the population of California and is a huge online market.

Since the laws are identical wouldn’t it still mean that any business complying with the GDPR (in order to do business in the EU) would already comply with the UK’s version of it, and vice versa?

How can you comply with one but not another given they are exact copies of each other?

You can collect and sell UK user data, so they don't need to change anything, they can just sell UK user data without worrying about gdpr

Are you able to cite your source for this? The UK transposed GDPR into its domestic legislation so this shouldn't be possible at the moment.

It wasn't possible even before GDPR - the UK has had strong data protection laws since the mid-90's

For now, yes. In the future, that may not be the case if the UK decides to diverge from the GDPR.

If the compelling threat was not being able to do business in the EU, then that business was and remains subject to GDPR anyway.

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