Culturally the US and Europe is drifting further apart and from the European side it's very hard to see that the US isn't wrong.
The EU basically threatening to ban the US from the Internet if they don't play ball on data protection is the sort of thing that might just be loud and forceful enough to get US politicians to actually pass some strong privacy legislation. I'm also happy that US intelligence agencies have been specifically called out - it's like some kind of virtuous inverse of the Five Eyes policy-laundering strategy.
My only complaint is that this ruling is the second-biggest incursion[1] of national borders into what is ostensibly supposed to be an international space. If interpreted a specific way, one might argue that even basic things like messaging systems and web forums need to be totally hosted in the EU, or users need to be siloed off from the US. I'd much rather prefer an international privacy framework that fixes the privacy issues without splintering the Internet, but we tried that with Privacy Shield and the courts shot that down.
[0] More generally, I've found that the gulf in culture between countries is often overstated. Usually because the person overstating it either wants to make the foreign country seem alien and thus interesting, or seem alien and thus dangerous.
[1] First-biggest one being China's Great Firewall
Also consider how it looks from outside : you can't expect to be aware of all the internal political details of all the countries, at some point you have to consider the people and their government as a single entity (remember how this is also what nations are supposed to be ?)
As an example of this, consider right-to-repair. In cases where it has been put up to a popular vote, it wins dramatically - like, 75% to 86% in favor. But if you go to legislators, they laugh you out of the room; and if they don't laugh you out of the room the governor vetoes it. This is an issue where the American public see it as obvious that repair should be open to all; while many of our politicians either just disagree with the concept, are worried about "intellectual property theft", or don't want to be the first to sponsor something that will wind up being in the next election's attack ads.
So what we have is a situation where Americans and Europeans are more aligned with one another than they are with American politicians.
I also really hate the whole "you get the leaders that you deserve" mentality, especially when applied to non-democratic societies. Not everyone voted for those leaders, nor does everyone always have the opportunity to vote in the first place. The whole concept of a "nation" is at best a convenient fiction; and worst an outright cancer that has fucked over several regions of the world. If you do not understand the internal divides of a nation, at least on a basic level, then you're just engaging in useless stereotyping.
Maybe politicians should ban themselves?
It is about USA politicians and USA laws that allow USA to do anything with our data as if we were terrorists.
The "Privacy Shield" was established by politicians twice already and dismantled twice by EU courts.
The initiative to strike down privacy shield and enforce ban is a result of civil society.
https://noyb.eu/en/austrian-dsb-eu-us-data-transfers-google-...
> 2020 CJEU ruling hits the real world. In July 2020, the CJEU has issued its groundbreaking "Schrems II" ruling, holding that a transfer to US providers that fall under FISA 702 and EO 12.333 violate the rules on international data transfers in the GDPR. The CJEU consequently annulled the transfer deal "Privacy Shield", after annulling the previous deal "Safe Harbor" in 2015. While this sent shock waves through the tech industry, US providers and EU data exporters have largely ignored the case. Just like Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon, Google has relied on so-called "Standard Contract Clauses" to continue data transfers and calm its European business partners.
> Max Schrems, honorary chair of noyb.eu: "Instead of actually adapting services to be GDPR compliant, US companies have tried to simply add some text to their privacy policies and ignore the Court of Justice. Many EU companies have followed the lead instead of switching to legal options."
Citizens use google and facebook and whatsapp because they trust these companies.
Politicians are trying to intervene because politicians like posturing, being the center of attention, pretending problems exist and they have the solution.
In Europe, politicians dominate too much the debate. We are gullible not for trusting google, but for trusting politcians