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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

GDPR was meant to spite google, it ended up killing all their competition. Who knows, maybe that was the plan?

Main Problem with the Big Companies is that these are located in Ireland.

The Commissioner there has no resources [0] to pursue these cases but he can't be bypassed when it comes to fees (at least convention of the other Commissioners if not by the GDPR itself).

The other Commissioners are becoming more and more upset with this and planing to institute a board to overrule Ireland's Commissioner. But all of this is very slow...

You can't imagen the frustration over this on part of the other Comissioners

[0] https://technology.ie/data-protection-commissioner-double-wo...

Want to second this. There's been a lot of criticism of the Irish commissioner's approach, both from Data Privacy advocates here in Ireland (e.g.: Digital Rights Ireland), and at the EU level.

This is a major flaw in the European regulatory process; regional regulators in regions with a high concentration of activity often get overwhelmed.

> [0] https://technology.ie/data-protection-commissioner-double-wo...

/r/nottheonion

> The other Commissioners are becoming more and more upset with this and planing to institute a board to overrule Ireland's Commissioner. But all of this is very slow...

Interesting, do you know of a news article or something similar about this?

Alvar Freude (Employee at a DPO in Germany) talked about it in "Auslegungssache"[0] Episode 9. The whole talk is in German, though.

[0]https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Auslegungssache-Der-Datensch...

Thanks!

GDPR is heavily based on the old German "Bundesdatenschutzgesetz" (Federal Data Protection Act). There is little new in it that wasn't the law in Germany already, only now it carries way higher penalties.

The law was passed in 1977 in its first form on the federal level, was already in effect on state-level in 1971, and thus is older than Google by a few decades.

Yeah, the GDPR was an evolution of data protection, not a revolution.

The previous European legislation on this was the Data Protection Directive from 1995, predating Google by three years.

So? EU or Ireland are not Germany

Google literally helped write GDPR. So no, it wasn't meant to spite them.

The GDPR being meant to spite Google (rather than, you know, protecting privacy) is an unfounded conspiracy theory. Claiming the EU tried to support a US company by harming its (European) competition doesn't even deserve that level.

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