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Micha艂 "rysiek" Wo藕niak 路 馃嚭馃嚘

@feliks

> they give companies less room to emerge from within the EU

This is extremely reductive and simplistic.

First of all, banning slavery or child labour also "put companies at a disadvantage". But it still was the right thing to do.

Secondly, there are companies that emerged in EU *thanks* to GDPR. Plausible Analytics is one. Matomo is another. Lidl's compute cloud is also a great example:
ft.com/content/08eb1b45-91c2-4

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Micha艂 "rysiek" Wo藕niak 路 馃嚭馃嚘

@feliks and one could say that US weak competition regulation puts US emerging companies at a disadvantage, for example.

It's very easy for Big Tech to swallow them or price them out of their market (and then hike the prices once the competition is gone). Which leads to a monopolized or oligopolized market with a handful of "too big to fail" companies, instead of a market that is healthy, diverse, resilient.

I like the EU approach better.

feliks

@rysiek

i think it's more relevant to compare market sizes and prioritize based on that (see last post above).

while i also would like to believe that a market as positive as you described it does not relate to monopolies or oligopolies, i see the opposite. i see an example in common ownership for leading global asset managers. while it's existent and critizised scholarly it might impact market stability negatively

how would you characterize the EU approach?

Micha艂 "rysiek" Wo藕niak 路 馃嚭馃嚘

@feliks I am not an economist and I would not venture to characterize the broad economic approach one way or another.

But it's pretty clear that privacy regulations are stronger in the EU. It's pretty clear that other tech-related regulations are stronger in the EU.

To me that approach amounts to putting digital human rights above corporate interests, at least in *some* (important) cases.

And when I hear someone say that that puts EU companies at a disadvantage, I recoil.

feliks

@rysiek yes i see it the same. if the EU would be able to project power towards the US these regulations could be enforced outside of the EU and therefore increase market size for these technologies, making them more relevant

feliks

@rysiek yes, i see it the same way from a moral pov. that's why i wanted to pronounce that i see value in regulations. for your second point: yes it is true that a different market with mostly local concerns promotes companies adapted to it. while lidl is a good example for this, it's revenue is a whole order of magnitude lower than that of more international companies like aws, azure and gcp. seeing google's relatively recent experiments like FLoC, i don't see them lagging behind plausible 馃У

Micha艂 "rysiek" Wo藕niak 路 馃嚭馃嚘

@feliks the disadvantage Lidl has in this case is not related to EU regulations, but to the fact that it is entering an oligopolized market with strong economies of scale.

GDPR gives Lidl an *advantage* here. And that was my point, which was in direct response to your claim that EU regulations put companies at a disadvantage.

Point being: these same regulations put other companies at an advantage or at least level the playing field a bit.

feliks

@rysiek analytics and matomo. their push towards removing the user agent from the browser. FLoC, etc are all indicative of them being able to identify people and devices without it. coming back to differences in the US and EU: i do see that capital investments related to technology is also off a rough order of magnitude. this also shifts other resources (e.g. talent) towards the US. i don't see companies like the two mentioned above to be competetive in data analysis internationally

Micha艂 "rysiek" Wo藕niak 路 馃嚭馃嚘

@feliks but we're not talking about absolute competitiveness of specific companies.

You made a very strong and broad claim:

> from an international competition's pov they give companies less room to emerge from within the EU, weakening it in the process

I provided a counter-example: companies that *benefited* from these regulations being in place in EU.

feliks

@rysiek i see. my expression might have been vague and i see your counter-example to be valid for this interpretation. i guess i wanted to focus more on international competition than on local emergence

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