> 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:
https://www.ft.com/content/08eb1b45-91c2-4312-9d3c-ac5e4e557278
@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.