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Comment by mping | Hacker News Reader

This completely misses the point, the laws shouldn't be written to accommodate businesses, its the other way around. If fragmenting is a consequence of better privacy laws, so be it.

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Laws should be written to facilitate and improve the growth of civilization. This includes practical and fair measures for conducting business.

Imposing byzantine regulations on every webmaster on the planet isn't helping anyone, least of all the European user, who will increasingly be locked out from the rest of the planet.

Depends on your perspective. It might be that American/Chinese predatory service providers are instead locked out of the European market, allowing the breathing space for local solutions to flourish.

If your local providers need the rest of the world to be kneecapped in order to compete, you may want to start with that problem.

The EU consumer will end up with strictly worse solutions and all the rest of the world will “gain” will be the crappy trade-barrier-supported Euro versions of Google and Facebook.

This is a short term view. There's a certain amount of 'activation energy' that a system needs to be able to kick off and become self sustaining. If a giant generalized, subsidized solution already exists PHBs are much happier to spend years trying to knock a round peg into a square hole than take the risk of doing something bespoke for the problem at hand.

Creating an artificially easy sandbox for your local engineers and entrepreneurs by banning the competition will not lead anywhere good. Competing with the best forces you to improve; playing on easy mode leads to stunted skills and inflated confidence - and worse products, companies, and economies.

It isn't banning the competition. It's forcing the external competition to follow the same rules as the locals w.r.t. privacy laws. The fact that the external competition can't comply means that there's a market niche available which locals have an opportunity to exploit.

Businesses exists for consumers. Fragmenting hurts people - European users - in the first place.

I see very little advantages from these privacy laws but I use and appreciate US businesses every day.

What, you don't appreciate a pop-up on every web page telling you that cookies are going to be used? XD

The cookie banners are a byproduct of companies still wanting to abuse your data, when was the last time you saw a cookie pop-up on HN? Logged in or not.

If only there were some way that European citizens could have told their browsers to not accept Cookies, then maybe we all wouldn't have to click on those banners all the damn time.

But I do want most non-tracking cookies.

Still, the "please let us track" popups can be fixed by policy or law, and I hope they are.

So if those businesses utterly refuse to serve consumers then they have no business existing?

They are definitely serving consumers, otherwise they would cease existing. They're not serving politicians and their pet cause of the day though.

If a business pays taxes, and the laws don't take their needs into account to some extent, that's not justice. It's just mob protection with a veneer of legitimacy.

Lots of loaded assumptions there, of course, starting with the first conditional clause.

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