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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I deleted that part of the comment almost as soon as I posted it, you must have somehow gotten that line when you accessed the page. However, the comparison isn't wrong. Convincing 500 million people to get on board with an initiative that will forever slow down the pace of innovation in your country, get you locked out of a large percentage of the Internet because your data (including your IP address) is radioactive, kill many existing businesses inside your own borders, and stop many others from ever being formed, is a difficult thing to do.

It's definitely a feat worthy of the Kool Aid reference.

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It slows down the innovation in a small subset of leeches which were taking advantage of new technology to abuse the citizens and residents of the EU. Cry me a river.

So in your opinion the only way to not slow down innovation, is to missuse peoples private data by ad-companies which don't even produce anything valuable?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17148781 for my reply to comments of this nature.

I looked at that and noticed a quote I feel is salient:

"The GDPR isn't vastly different to the old Data Protection Directive, which has been in force since 1997. The panic over GDPR suggests that a lot of companies had simply been ignoring the DPD. If a bit of bullying is required to get businesses to obey the law, then so be it." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17149581)

This rings true to me. I do have a strong suspicion, as an American who's worked for an American multi-national at a low level, that people have been ignoring the existing requirements for dealing with EU data properly. For years.

The flip side of all the wailing about heavy handed regulation is that business people will not obey something that isn't enforced. And then feel it is some sort of natural right to go on that way.

Yup, GDPR is pretty much harmonizing data protection laws across the EU. Much of the stuff that's in GDPR had already existed on a national level for quite a while in some EU countries, like France and Germany, but got mostly ignored by multi-nationals.

That's why the EU made these laws a big EU thing, so they are in a better position to actually enforce this stuff on multi-nationals.

> The flip side of all the wailing about heavy handed regulation is that business people will not obey something that isn't enforced. And then feel it is some sort of natural right to go on that way.

Business people aren't special - this is true of all people. Consider the wailing that would occur if police actually enforced speed limits.

forever slow down the pace of innovation in your country

On the contrary, since we’ll be wasting so much less time than countries still addicted to the attention economy, we’ll run rings around them in terms of productivity

You can always cancel any human-oriented law and get even more progress. Look where most of the [inhuman] progress was done: wars, henocide, communism. s: Imagine how many downsides we could experience by preventing big wars and ideologies of last century, oh my /s. Personally I’m glad that at least EU citizens can state where them lines should be drawn.

Wait, Communism as in "a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and the state."? Or did you mean Stalinism?

You’re right, I just used a ‘common’ term.

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