EU regulation has been a disaster for the web.
For the rest of the universe, it has been a pretty good deal.
Browser choice vs Microsoft were a big win.
GDPR is a big win.
I'd say it's 20:1
that's the US DoJ, not EU
You have third party data brokers in the US which has everyone's data and sells it to anyone, you don't have that in the EU. I'd say that is a pretty big change.
The American perspective tends to be that if millions of users are suffering because thousands of companies are interpreting the laws created by a single legislature, we should tell that one legislature to fix their shit. (Note: not that they actually do fix their shit, but that’s who we yell at)
The European perspective tends to be that the thousands of companies should each be individually yelled at to fix their shit (Note: not that they actually do fix their shit, but that’s who they yell at)
Neither way is all that effective tbh. But looking at the end results, I must say I prefer using the internet outside of the EU. I always use private browsing, and the implementation of EU rules when browsing the web in Europe makes this an absolutely insufferable experience. Pages and pages of legalese I have to click through to access a single google result - when guess what, none of that applies because I’m browsing in private. The natural response for me would be to then disable private browsing and let google store its “you clicked through our bullshit” cookie to make my life easier — resulting in the exact opposite of the intended effect of the law.
Like I said, neither side is perfect, but using the internet “privately” is actually much easier outside of the EU vs in it. To me, that means we need to yell at the legislature. Opinions may very.