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Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

>> the cost of achieving GDPR compliance could very well make the difference between whether some companies can succeed or not.

Is this a bad thing? If we take privacy seriously then it shouldn’t be. We don’t see too many people fighting food or drug regulations intended to keep us safe because it might be costly for companies to comply. Maybe if a company cannot afford to comply with privacy regulation they should not be handling our personal information. I guess the reason it seems heavy handed in the tech/web world is that the barrier to entry started at next to zero and so much of what we put on the web is not monetised that any cost/compliance seems like a massive burden.

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It is a trade-off which is not always acknowledged. It is not something that has 0 potentially negative consequences. And the competition and innovation that is stifled is often invisible (hard to see what could have been).

If you had less intervention with respect to privacy would there be more dynamic market-driven initiatives to fill the gaps? Would there be more incentive to develop technology that would be effective for privacy? I don't know.

Regulation is just hard because reality is complex and dynamic and regulation is often complex but not very dynamic.

> If you had less intervention with respect to privacy would there be more dynamic market-driven initiatives to fill the gaps?

This is hilarious. Because we had that, and it was lacking, to put it mildly. And some people still have that, in a way that's easy to compare (e.g. EU vs US, CA vs other states). For me, the results are in and obvious. Privacy regulations are the only thing that reflects the privacy externalities they might impose on society back onto them (and the shareholders).

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. Like you say, some regulations are needed, and we wouldn't want to allow unsafe cars on the road just because crash-tests are a barrier to entry for startups.

However it does serve as a moat for players with more capital, and that's something we should also be mindful of. For instance, maybe we could have some of the requirements scale and only kick in when a product meets certain thresholds in terms of numbers of users.

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