Just the mere fact that the EU government can be so technically inept as to draft and circulate such a legislation makes me totally distrust its intentions.
Plenty of startups from the EU have made it big. Just off the top of my head Spotify and Sitecore are pretty big.
Frankly the myopia of SV culture is quite amusing to me. California just can't shake it's gold rush mentality it seems. I'm not saying it hasn't served a lot of people well( obviously it has, but to assume it's the best strategy is pretty short sighted, especially considering I've never seen any actual evidence that it produces a larger number of sustainable businesses. In fact most US startups seem to me to be more like schemes for getting aquihire, or straight up hail marries, rather that actual attempts to make money and build a sustainable business.
Also, any entrepreneur that takes the attitude of "it's impossible to do with all of these rules and bureaucracy" is hardly deserving of the name, especially considering it's not really that bad[1], if they were serious, they would find a way to use the rules to their advantage rather than finding excuses or complaining over nothing.
[1] For example in many parts of the EU, not only are taxes much lower than the rest, but costs of living and doing business are as well, and many of the rules are less enforced, maybe Europeans simply don't value collectible blockchain cat pictures or IoT fidget spinners as much as Americans do and are less willing to invest in them.
This has little to do with mindset and a lot to do with inequality. SV has the highest percentage of billionaires per million citizens in the world. They can afford funding pointless startups that buy each other's products - as a hobby.
This also explains the incredibly high salaries and cost of living.
When a good startup comes out there's enough wealth around to boost it into wild success, create more billionaires and the cycle continues.
Mention one such law.
EU law that creates a barrier for startups? Here are just a few examples that are likely to be relevant to a typical startup we might have been discussing on HN, in addition to the various attempted IP changes mentioned elsewhere in today's discussion:
* Article 82(c) (the foundation of the anti-price-discrimination regime)
* Consumer Rights Directive
* ePrivacy Directive
* VAT regulations (particularly the 2015 changes affecting digital services)
* GDPR
All of these could credibly have been introduced with good intentions. Many of us would probably support reasonable consumer rights protections or privacy provisions, for example.
However, all of them have been criticised for their practical implementation and their adverse (and possibly unintended) effects on smaller businesses.
He's the one behind these dumb copyright ideas, and he pushed for similar stuff in Germany. He proposed/wrote them when he was still a Commissioner until a year or two ago.
If that's it, the real question is why on Earth they're using their intuitions.
When I am ignorant of a field, I don't pretend to be knowledgeable, instead I consult an expert.
Politicians seem unwilling or unable to do this with technological matters.
Lawyers (bureaucracy, politicians team, industry reps) draft regulations. It is unlikely that the lawyers who drafted GDPR for instance were unaware of possible side effects. Given the enormous amount of legal work in checks and certification that has come out of this for the legal industry, it may even have been intentional.
Good intentions coupled with poor knowledge is usually much worse than the lack of good intentions.
Vide "In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad Law" from EFF: https://www.eff.org//deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored...
Even if smaller players take all super duper steps to protect user data, advertisers have no real way of knowing if they are in fact compliant whereas they have a simple way of looking at the published balance sheets of the big players and seeing the huge cash pile and armies of lawyers. The scare caused by activists weilding "nightmare letters" doesn't help. Also there's a body of thought in legal circles that even vendor chains needs to be evaluated which is causing advertisers to be wary. Far simpler to just throw money at the biggies who will deal with this.
As usual, the smart money will be in the certification industry that will inevitably come up to tax the mid sized players while the small publishers will die out.
Remember the adage “divide and conquer”? If you want to destroy something, consolidating its power base (like GDPR does to advertising in Europe) is a poor first move.
The GDPR doesn't only apply to advertising companies. When you're offering services in exchange for money you still have your customers' names, IP addresses etc. Even if you aren't using any of that information for advertising or data mining, you still have it, which means you still have the compliance cost. A lot of that cost is not proportional to how much data you have or what you do with it.
And that's the problem. The GDPR will never destroy Google or Facebook, but it can destroy a three person startup that has nothing to do with advertising and might have offered an ad-free alternative to some of their services.
If destroying the ad industry is the goal, why not just tax advertising at >90%?
And if you don't profit from a website and just want to place advertisements to keep the lights on, you don't have that kind of money.
Now, seriously, there are so many other problems here and GDPR compliance is so easy when you've already paid attention to security of your service, that it really does not make sense to blame a good law. Losers who cannot comply just don't deserve to be on the market.
The story with copyright directive is completely different and has no connection to GDPR.
So what I think is - when the antagonism ends up taking big chunks of money everyone will suddenly realize "oh shit, it's not bottomless" at which point there will opportunities to take advantage of.
But maybe my take is too reasonable and instead the advertisers will think oh damn, stuff is really messed up better stay the course with these big guys to get us through these troubled times!