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The narrative here seems not so hard to predict. Large incumbents may still have revenue which is negatively impacted by the regulation at the same time that the regulation raises the barrier to entry for smaller competitors. They're not mutually exclusive concepts.

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Sure, but this NYT times piece that says Google specifically tried to 'slow down' European privacy rules disproves Thompson's argument that they want privacy to impede competition. It's pretty binary- if they wanted privacy regulations they wouldn't have slowed them down, if they slowed them down then clearly they don't want privacy regulations. I don't see what other conclusion could be drawn

One reason to slow it down could be that the company needed more time for implementation work to get compliant.

At Google's scale, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a factor.

Yes, a pebble in the shoe of Google but could be a mountain in the way of smaller company.

The cost of GDPR is mostly related to technical debt, not company size. A small company with little debt will not face any issues with GDPR. Google just bet on they themselves having much less technical debt than the other giants.

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