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Comment by nforgerit | Hacker News Reader

We've been there with GDPR. It didn't help creating the level playing field they officially wanted to achieve. BigTech has law departments whilst local tech startups have to deal with legal battles initiated by third-class legal firms crawling the web.

They just end up making their local tech entrepreneurs flee to US/UK.

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> They just end up making their local tech entrepreneurs flee to US/UK.

Really? Which startups flee due to GDPR?

In my experience as a user, I now have option to download my data and know what's collected about me. I like it.

Most prominent recent heads-up was BionTech who decided to start a "Strategic Partnership" with the UK government for their research.

[0] https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...

And this is connected to GDPR how exactly?

Companies do these things all the time, I guess it's fun to imagine that opening offices in other countries is fleeing and that are fleeing to UK because they are having trouble processing personal data when developing drugs but I don't see why would that be the case.

Fun fact: UK data protection laws are about the same as EU.

As an entrepreneur you have to deal with finances, a great product and market competition. Why on earth would you additionally put legal insecurity on top, up until in a couple of years there might be enough jurisdictional rulings putting shallow definitions in EU regulations into context?

Fun fact: Why would UK miss the chance to attract tech companies and get rid of pre-Brexit laws after they went through all the unfortunate hassle Brexit was?

> Why would UK miss the chance to attract tech companies and get rid of pre-Brexit laws after they went through all the unfortunate hassle Brexit was?

Because UK is not made of libertarians who were under the EU opression but all those EU laws were made with UK's contribution and input. The UK has not become the libertarian utopia and will not become the libertarian utopia inside or outside of EU because the British public at large doesn't want it. If anything, probably the Labour party will win the next elections, the libertarians are very unpopular. British are not Americans and most don't trust corporations and want government involvement in protecting them against wrongdoings.

Brexit's biggest con was that EU is some 3rd party and the British public wants something else. In reality, Brits made the EU.

What is the relation between Personalized mRNA Cancer Immunotherapies and GDPR??

Data?

Can you give some examples of you needing to download your data? What actions did you take based on it? How often do you do it?

The benefit actually comes from forcing companies to keep good track of the personal data. Now, the personal data is something they need to think about how to handle and store, the downloading part for me so far was about curiosity.

The fact that you can download some data, presented as “all data”, doesn’t mean that it’s actually properly stored and handled. No way to verify or enforce it.

> The benefit actually comes from forcing companies to keep good track of the personal data

Who is checking for that? Can you give me an example of any public authority within the EU that has the operational excellence to even understand how BigTech is collecting and handling data? For Germany I only see Ulrich Kelber who certainly does not have the competence to even understand how BigTech is doing their things.

It's not about going around and checking but being responsible about it. Thanks to GDPR companies do have someone designated to deal with these things and if they screw up and something bad happens they are liable.

And here we are at the core problem: Implementing laws without being able enforce them is not only ridiculous but harmful for the credibility of any governmental institution. This is the core problem of all EU tech regulations.

Instead of developing operational excellence in their prosecution authorities to be able to track down and punish bad actors, they install regulations for everyone and try to simulate competence harming their own economy.

> Implementing laws without being able enforce them is not only ridiculous but harmful [...]

Not all crimes are preventable, which doesn't mean the laws aren't enforceable. Example: even though murder is illegal, people still commit murder, but they are rightfully punished for it, as the law mandates.

> [...] harming their own economy.

Do you have any proof that tech regulation is detrimental to the economy?

If it was just a matter of designating someone, major mobile carriers wouldn’t store passwords as plaintext.

Oh they don't flee, they just don't bother to start new ones in the EU.

Which of the new AI labs is setup in EU?

Stability? Midjourney? Anthropic? Cohere? Every single one is either in the US or UK. LLM companies deal with huge legal uncertainties, especially around data and privacy. Hence investors are reluctant to fund any in the EU, and potential founders are deterred. This is all legacy of the GDPR and the 'regulatory superpower' mindset that the EU deluded itself into.

The only new wave AI company from the EU is DeepL, which is going to face really really intense competition from LLMs.

Europe missing out in tech has much longer history than EU itself.

here is a quick watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZdmS-EAbHo

I have no idea why would you claim that with the introduction of GDPR Europe lost on tech. By tech I mean the SV industry, there are many other technologies out there.

Anyway, why all the "tech" is in SV? Do they have GDPR in the other states?

Midjourney is not in SV, its remote. Stability is HQ-ed in London.

There are plenty of smaller AI startups splattered across the US.

FYI, the UK has the same legislation as GDPR

I don't know internals but would bet that it's an implementation of GDPR which happened shortly before Brexit. Do you really think after all that Brexit hassle they will miss the chance to attract tech companies?

Your answer implies that the GDPR repels tech companies, which I would like to see a convincing proof of.

AFAIK, so far the UK is quite happy with the GDPR and has no plans to abandon it.

I'm sure European startups like Plausible, Matomo, Nextcloud, which exist because of the GDPR or have gotten a huge boost from it agree with you.

None of those are truly innovative. They are basically reinventing the wheel.

Who cares, as long as they reinvent it with safety screws on it.

Well the point is that Europe is helplessly missing globally competitive innovative shops in important IT sectors. This is a big economical and political problem which is not solved by referring to marginal copycats of existing US services.

As an employee of a European company which is chosen by European and US customers alike _specifically_ for our competence in European market regulation I see opportunity where you see shortage. Of course, we will never join the ranks of public celebrities such as Facebook or Google, but who cares, really. It's very likely you've interacted with our products in one way or another, we've made some revenue with it, and that counts. That the technology is coming from Europe, you'll never know.

Oh really? What about LAION? The group who is developing open ai models?

Well I am hearing of them for the first time. Yeah I could be an ignorant, or they are not as relevant as you make it sound. A quick wiki search mentions they are best known for providing datasets for Stable diffusion and Imagen.

And if this is your counter example, then it proves my point that the Americans far more innovative currently.

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