While it's easy to start mulling over why and how things are or could have done differently I'd argue that there is no animosity towards American companies per se. The data of its citizens however is a very sensitive issue for EU and in the light of Snowden leaks maybe they are rightfully fearful of US having too much technological hold over them. There is silly people over both sides of the ocean but let's not start willfully feeding rash preconceptions for no reason.
Consider what the Economist has to say about Margrethe Vestager, who runs Europe's trustbusting agency.
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21728979-she-rich-wo...
Some people have actually bought that idea. But I imagine they'd want the US government to exhibit some of that jealousy against Facebook right about now, too...especially with Facebook now announcing that they won't implement the GDPR globally.
Ironically, it's the same media entities that seem to have essentially admitted they got it wrong with all the negative posts they've published against Facebook recently, and I think those sorts of articles will continue against Google and other privacy-violating companies, too, in the near future.
This is to say: you don't have to be an American company to end up in the crosshairs of overzealous and downright populist regulators.
Source: used to work there, had to help respond to a rather ludicrous 40-page list of questions.
[0] Headquarters in Amsterdam, culturally strongly influenced by the Dutch, the biggest concentration of staff and virtually all product development in Amsterdam, albeit owned by an American company.
This is a common misconception - GDPR is already "in effect". It will be enforced from 25 May...
Same.
> Facebook's tax of 5k/year in the UK, the double irish with a dutch sandwich, the backroom deals from the 80s with the Irish govt.. these are global practices which truly devastate everyone in the long run.
And are all legal, and designed as so by the government. Auditing won't make a difference, since it is legal. Don't like it? Make it illegal. Simple as that.
> actually trust bureaucrats to step in and audit - and subjectively think they very often do a decent job of explaining rationales given europeans' known tendency of bickering on pretty much everything.
Oh, no issue with that. My issue is with this:
> Or Google and Facebook will be held to a higher standard of compliance.
What we're dealing with here is loopholes and nothing more under various incarnations - take patents in the US or the lax tax policies of Malta or Isle of Man as an example - and you'll get a sense on why a bit of cleaning up is sorely needed.
Oh, I agree, it definitely needs cleaning up.
Than whom else? VK? Baidu? ICQ?
Otherwise, it would be a good idea to at least accept the possibility of sincerity when different polities want different rules than the US.
Suggesting that US companies should be above reproach or oversight, by definition, or that the EU would treat local or Asian companies who tried to pull the same stunts more generously is not based on evidence.
If US corporates try to flout European law, they'll suffer consequences. Market cap does not provide a free pass for being a bad actor.
> Or Google and Facebook will be held to a higher standard of compliance.
> Or Google and Facebook will be held to a higher standard of compliance.
(Possibly thanks to GDPR) companies may object to that request if it costs local laws.
But yeah. Go on pretending that the EU lives to target American companies. From a European's point of view, American companies are not find enough as they view privacy, data, sovereignty etc. as some abstract concepts that don't apply to them.
Sometimes the only reason they make themselves a target is because they make money, and American companies are the largest players in the space, not EU ones.
They should be and that is a great thing.
As for enforcement, if you're a European company you have much more to be worried about since it is going to be much easier to go after you.
Selective enforcement is hopefully going to be limited to going after a couple of very prominent offenders after which the remainder will fall in line.
No, but a correction is long overdue to signal to international companies that the primacy of politics still exists. How companies conduct themselves is determined by European law and European citizens, not businesses.
Companies have only themselves to blame for having brought it on. Whether it's skirting taxes, mistreating user-data or assisting in election-meddling, if companies are not willing to self-regulate they will be regulated. That's an overdue message to send.
This was in anti-trust, because privacy-related enforcement is actually left to the EU states and doesn't actually happen very often.
But in anti-trust, there is no evidence of any bias against US companies. The distribution of (the sum of) fines among EU, American, and Asian companies actually tracks closely with their respective market shares in the EU.
The only divergence I found was slightly fewer/lower fines being levied on US companies, and slightly higher numbers for Asian companies. I would attribute this divergence to the far more advanced oversight in the US vs. most Asian countries: the EU doesn't need to get involved if these companies are well-regulated in their home countries.
It'd be interesting to do a similar analysis for the US. As a German, I've heard similar grumbling regarding the fines against Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank. Personally, I doubt that those fines are motived by nationalistic motives. They might just show different approaches to corporate wrongdoing, with Germany either being too chummy with its industry, or possibly putting too much trust in the force of negative publicity alone to change behaviour.
Privacy will invariably generate more headline-worthy conflicts with US companies, simply because that's where all the large companies are located. But if you're in the US, I'll also point out a certain bias in what you'll see reported, considering EU fines against exclusively EU companies are unlikely to make the US news.
Trust me when I say that privacy happens to be a major concern of many voters in the EU. There is robust and constant debate regarding, for example, data collection by governments and law enforcements. In Germany, there is major opposition against the increased use of video surveillance, the use of phone location data in law enforcement, and EU legislation requiring the retention of communication data.
There is a low-hum undercurrent of anti-Americanism in some discussions of Facebook, Google et al, possibly more so in France than Germany or the UK. But Europeans are constantly exposed to US media and such familiarity breeds trust. If Facebook where Chinese, or Google were Russian, distrust and call for regulation would be far stronger than it is.
It'll be interesting to see how the first few non-compliance cases go. I would like to think if a requirement was vague, a company had made a reasonable interpretation of it and the company was responsive in making changes to become compliant that no fines would be issued.