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Yeah, it is funny to see that underneath all that socialism and all that postmodern philosophical masturbation, Europe really still believes in feudalism and is furious that us new world peasants won't pay the King's Tax! Don't we know that they are our betters!
I don't know how to say this but you're the richest and most powerful people in the world. This kind of discussion always turns into a Bravery Debate but regulation like GDPR is more about clawing back some agency from America than it is trying to tax US industry.
As the Right discovered five years ago, and the Left discovered when Musk bought X, network effects and the overall stack just don't allow for 'make-your-own' social media.
(I don't actually like or agree with the vast majority of this regulation, though I think that GDPR specifically was a step in the right direction of forcing companies to give more than absolutely zero shits about the privacy of their customers).
Normally I wouldn't be quite so thin-skinned but the Greenland fiasco drove home for me just how worrying it is that half of the most powerful country in the world thinks of us as being essentially a pantomime villain from a Mel Gibson movie.
"Nearly zero" is more than absolutely zero. GDPR doesn't do much to stop collection of personal data because nearly everything is allowed if it can be useful. Meanwhile, the costs of failing compliance is steep enough that most tech companies go to the US where they don't have to worry about it.
It's also hard for me to take Europe's claims to privacy protection seriously when many of their countries force you to dox yourself to register a SIM card. If they actually cared about privacy, then they would just not collect personal information, which is unnecessary for a phone number. Ironically enough, the GDPR-free United States does not have any such laws compelling self-doxing for SIM cards.
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People will say stuff like this but GDPR is actually a gigantic pain in the ass to everyone involved because it means every single database the holds any data about anything has to be manually cleared by engineers to not happen to obliquely contain data the could be viewed as slightly about europe. I'm going to have to get on early morning calls for the next six months to get our US facing entirely internal application dealing in US tax credits cleared because of this stupid law. All while the fly by night company registered in kekistan that will actually do malicious stuff with your data just ignores the law and all the apps that were collecting it on purpose before put up a cookie that 99.98% of people accept immediately with minor annoyance. The legislators behind this should be tried at the Hague for pissing away thousands or millions of lifetimes worth of dev hours for their pure hubris.
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That's cool, but your tech sector is a joke and since we're not trying to hand the entire internet over to China we'd appreciate it if you'd stop getting your anti-tech cooties on us. Sorry if casual access to accurate rape stats is destabilizing your society or whatever.
It wasn't China who gave us trans, BLM, 'hands up don't shoot' in a country with no guns, Free Palestine, and woke. That was you guys. Thanks :)
Look at it this way, the alternative to being caught in our wake was to do anything yourselves, and at least you didn't get suckered into that scam.
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I'm pretty sure we're not responsible for trans (Sweden) or "Free Palestine" (Arabs)
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We do, though. In 2024, US tech companies paid more in fines alone (€3.8 billion) than the income tax revenue of the entire European tech sector (€3.2 billion).
https://atr.org/brussels-exploits-american-tech-companies-by-enforcing-heavy-fines-for-regulatory-non-compliance/
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