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Comment by ksajadi | Hacker News Reader

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> Having had to deal many EU regulations and see their negative impact on small businesses for no sizeable beneficial outcome to the average EU citizen

Because you didn't give any concrete examples the fact you couldn't see any "sizeable beneficial outcome to the average EU citizen" could easily be because of your own ignorance as far as I'm concerned.

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I kind of despise that too, but in this case it kind of makes sense, the submitted project is a collaboration effort by German and French governments, so talking about various EU governments spending their time and effort on FOSS kind of makes sense, although I also disagree with most of the points parent brought up, FWIW.

Their thirst to regulate everything and everyone like they did with GDPR and the gatekeeper legislation?

The EU has been a massive force of good for consumer rights

As a programmer maybe we weren't meant to just be able to have a "thirst" to store "everything and everyone's" data forever. Just implement the GDPR deletion and the data export batch.

And the AI Act with the FLOPs limit?

Or the Cybersecurity Act increasing liability for selling software complete with a box-ticking exercise to force money into consultants?

Or the DSA creating loads of bureaucracy for "algorithmic" content when almost everything is an algorithm?

What's the comparative?

The US is restricting nvidias ability to ship GPU's because they're worried about AI. At least the EU's stance is: open, voted on and clear.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/us-govt-restricts-shipment...

Well, I consider software liability a good thing. Question is how to achieve this goal. Of course it's sad when a bureaucracy answers this with the only means a bureaucracy has: A box-ticking exercise.

This. Most EU regulations are common sense and/or don't apply to small companies.

Have a privacy policy, don't collect unnecessary user data, encrypt data properly, don't use cookies to track people outside what is needed for your website to function, and allow your users to access and delete their data. You should have already done that before GDPR, and if you did not, you're the reason we need the law.

Agreed about your points, not so much about paper drink straws.

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I just believe that regulation should be standardized. Like all my documents can be in this one european locker (I am not sure if it exists) where filing for regulation can be made really really easy. I don't hate regulation , I just hate friction , if we can really remove the maximum amount of friction in regulation as we can without meaningfully removing the purpose of regulation , then we are talking!

(I live in India and its called digilocker here , it still has a lot of issues and isn't that useful for corporation but I did hear something about digilocker for corporation regulations as well)

Reducing friction is the EU's raison d'être, near everything it does is to facilitate trade between members. From the single currency to harmonized labor laws, without forgetting the mandated switch to USB-c.

And United States still has regulations. Chevron doctrine is not a thing in Europe and European institutions do not get captured by NIMBYs when industry wants to build a railroad, a house or an apartment complex. There are no hundreds of governmental organizations demanding you impact assessments and environmental studies.

For crying out loud, as an American you cannot work on your own house, since a lot of labour is licensed (electrical work, etc) and taped in red.

The regulation Americans talk of in disparaging way is always the regulation that shifts and allows consumer/user surplus.

In the US you can work on your own house, including electrical and plumbing (including natural gas and propane lines, I think). For minor repairs like replacing a switch or receptacle, I don’t think a permit is required. For more substantial changes a permit is generally required and as is an inspection. Supplies for doing all kinds of residential construction work are readily available at retail establishments that normal people visit regularly.

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Do you believe this to always have been the case or only since Nov 2024?

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