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Comment by hnhg | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any citations for your claim about EU innovation being bogged down by regulatory capture? In general, I've found that it's more like risk aversion in VC and other local cultural aspects before anything at an EU level comes into play.

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Yeh I agree. I hear this a lot but my experience working has been that the US has waaaaayyyy more redtape and regulation stuff to deal with. Taxes for example or the absolute mess of applying for government grants.

I have experience in both places.

Taxes and government grants are pretty much the main areas where this is true. Taxes especially.

Not so for other things, in my experience.

Used to work for a small Ad-Tech firm in Germany. GDPR massively dented the business WITH NO BENEFITS to privacy. Advertisers still collect shit tons of data, your website performance is still crappy and the end result was that EU users now have to navigate MBs of Javascript popups, that try to trick me into selling data using dark patterns (blue highlight on accept all instead of Reject all).

All it succeeded was in consolidating the ad-tech space into a few big players and resulted in acquisitions of many small ad-tech firms.

An acquaintance of mine started a medical Tech firm and is now a consultant for dealing with govt. rules on medical stuff. Not sure why he quit , but I believe that consulting for dealing with German/EU bureaucracy maybe far more lucrative than having a medical startup in the EU.

Not to mention, despite the first world status, internet is Germany is Dog-shit. I mean worse than 3rd world crap. I was in Bangalore and I had way better internet 3 years ago.

Getting bogged down by the GDPR isn't demonstrating regulatory capture, just that the policy had a real impact (which may be what people actually want, even if that means it's a hassle for business).

If anything, it's a demonstration the EU, on this point, was not captured by vested interests: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp

The popups aren't compliant with either the intent or the letter of the law and instead pass under the legal theory of "if all of us are guilty none of us are guilty," which so far seems to be holding.

You could argue that it's not regulatory capture and instead it should be called enforcement capture or judicial capture, but absent that level of nuance I think the more accurate simplification should be "regulatory capture" rather than "real impact."

It's a shame there were no claimed benefits to privacy but adtech getting bogged down is very much an intended outcome.

The shitty cookie popups and what not are a symptom of how awful the adtech industry is. The alternative to getting bogged down was probably getting outright destroyed, and i don't think EU businesses are ready for that.

Adtech did not get bogged down. It just got consolidated into fewer, more invasive hands (google, instagram, amazon, etc), that have far more data and most importantly can mine and analyze it better than the 1000s of small ad tech firms.

I don't think the second shoe of big fines has adequately dropped to be able to determine how much of an effect GDPR actually has.

> 3rd world crap

> Bangalore

Shows how much you know if you walked into India expecting “3rd world” internet.

On the contrary this is a praise of how good Internet in India actually is.

It is praise, but it’s also obvious to anyone who knows anything about India. This person knew nothing, was my point. And yet they talk so much about related subjects.

I read it as a praise for Indian internet.

And let's be honest. In spite of my aversion to the big telco magnates, Jio was a huge improvement over the status quo. I will agree that German internet is shit compared to Indian internet.

So, I'm going to argue that GDPR didn't go far enough, since the intended (or at least, implied) goal was to put Ad-Tech firms out of business. If your business cannot operate without spying on people, it shouldn't operate.

Being able to confuse people into "consenting" was an unintended consequence, but hopefully the European court system can put a stop to this dark pattern nonsense.

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