> These are European laws designed to regulate industry inside the EU.
More like regulating industry which are accessible within the EU, which may not even be EU based. So these laws have broader reach, similar to how the US DMCA had broader effective reach.
> If an American company decides to do business in the EU they're subject to the same rules as any business already operating inside the EU.
If an internet service decides not to ban access to EU users, they become subject to these laws. It doesn’t matter whether the company is based in the EU or not for the law to apply, but rather if they are serving EU users.
This is similar to laws passed by states like NY and CA in the US which require things like privacy policies to have certain disclosures, the effect is that regardless of the law coming from a specific jurisdiction, due to the nature of the Internet and not wanting to turn customers away through geographical blocking, companies far and wide get roped into following these local regs.
> So claiming this is designed to hurt US tech companies is quite a reach. If you feel American tech companies are being hit harder than their EU counterparts then perhaps that is because those American tech companies were attempting to game the system to begin with.
So here’s where I think you’ve made an unjustified leap. It’s very possible to pass an unfair or hairbrained law which applies to everyone operating in or serving a jurisdiction (EU) and even where the terms of the law apply evenly to all companies, but where the practical impact of the law is targeted to impact specific players in the market.
It’s clearly obvious (just look at the actual discussion of the politicians as they work to enact these laws) that they are motivated by an intense dislike of US tech company dominance in the EU.
But the amusing thing is the laws so far have just managed to further establish US tech dominance. So we see an ongoing escalation where nationalistic bias against specific companies drives increasingly poor public policy.
> It's really no different to how goods manufactured outside of the US still have to adhere to American safety regulations if they want to get sold inside the US.
It’s similar in the sense that they are both domestic policies which have international reach. For example, we’ve seen product safety around lead content in children’s toys due to Chinese imports with lead.
The key difference is that the policy is made completely ignorant of specific companies deemed “responsible” but follow from a pure general principle “lead should never be in children’s toys.”
In this case we have obviously terrible policy (“you should have to pay to link to someone on the Internet”) because the underlying principle driving the new regulation is in fact more like “how do we save old media in the face of big bad Google”?