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> EU is about to enforce GDPR [...] if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies Surely you see the contradiction there. > Currently i

> EU is about to enforce GDPR [...] if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies Surely you see the contradiction there. > Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if [...] That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more and more laws and rules, regardless of the intentions, is the opposite direction. One can lament the digital lawlessness, but we can't pretend it didn't have value or that tailored laws could have a similar effect.

candu 9y ago
Not necessarily a contradiction - GDPR could have many possible effects; it's too early to claim that these effects will disproportionately harm small companies. One possibility, of course, is that larger companies will have more resources to tackle GDPR compliance, and thus be better able to respond effectively than small companies. However, it's also possible that, by taking privacy / security seriously from day one and storing the minimal set of user data needed to operate, a smaller company will have a distinct advantage over some BigCo that must now migrate sprawling, inter-tangled distributed systems never designed for GDPR compliance. After all, that small company now has a compelling legal reason to avoid feature / data warehousing bloat and save their limited engineering resources, whereas the larger company most certainly has that bloat baked deeply into their stack due to years and years of "Big Data" hype.
- kodablah 9y ago
  > it's too early to claim that these effects will disproportionately harm small companies. It's not too early to claim that the risks are disproportionate. Those of us with small companies really just count on subjective enforcement. Sadly, it seems everyone says "do nothing wrong, nothing to worry about" with these kinds of laws and don't understand risk management or the cost of conformance.
- deltron3030 9y ago
  It's not strictness being the problem, it's the uncertainty. GDPR seems like a framework to take out anybody at will, because nobody can really conform to the laws due to that uncertainty. If you do anything really disruptive/innovative, you're probably gonna get problems.
  - candu 9y ago
    I really dislike this use of the term "disruptive / innovative" - it's almost a circular definition in this context, since it's effectively being used to mean "anything new that has a high chance of running afoul of the law". English has better words for this sort of thing: criminal, negligent, etc. Launching a new product / service does not give a company carte blanche to do whatever they like, no matter what Uber et al. may prefer to believe. Suppose I want to create a "gun-share" app, because, you know, sharing economy and stuff. I should fully expect that, where laws exist that make this infeasible (e.g. background checks, transfer of ownership laws, etc.), those laws will be enforced. I should also fully expect that those laws might change. If I've been paying attention to the broader world - something that Silicon Valley isn't historically that great at - I should probably have seen this coming for years, since that's how long it takes to build support for legislation. GDPR didn't come out of nowhere; data privacy, security, and ownership concerns have been building for a while now. In the case of the GDPR: my personal position is that it gives EU citizens rights we should all have had from the start with respect to our data. Good on them for passing it, and for giving it teeth. If that tramples on some service that can't be bothered to respect those rights, I couldn't care less - and I say this as a small business owner who's fully aware that, yes, someday I too may face a GDPR compliance request. Maybe I'll be prepared, maybe I won't, maybe it'll never happen; that's part of doing business.
lucideer 9y ago
> That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more and more laws and rules, regardless of the intentions, is the opposite direction You're presenting the situation as a failure of the EU, but I think you've missed the point here. The big players are located in the US because the environment there rewards big players and has a general snowball effect. The EU system rewards small-player innovation and limits the creation of very large, dominant, monopolistic big players. This should be a net benefit to the overall system, if it weren't fot big players just coming in from elsewhere. Unfortunately, due to the global nature of the web, this leads to less-regulated US big players dominating the EU players. Solving that is tough, but the fact GDPR applies to US companies is an interesting start.
- kodablah 9y ago
  > The EU system rewards small-player innovation and limits the creation of very large, dominant, monopolistic big players. I disagree. Do you believe this is the case today or is it the goal? From what I understand, the gap is quite large between number of small companies based on environment. Many of us with smaller companies stand on the shoulder of giants. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good, and that can mean the financial incentive to become large spurs those of us who are small. Artificial ceilings, however altruistic people tell themselves they are by limiting the big, bad, scary companies, often are just a low tide lowering all boats in a trickle-down way.
  - lucideer 9y ago
    > Do you believe this is the case today or is it the goal? From what I understand, the gap is quite large between number of small companies based on environment. You're right, but what I was saying is that I believe it is the case today in the EU to a far greater extent than in it is in the US. That's not saying in any way that the EU is close to an ideal situation, or that there aren't big, dominant EU players. Along with the case of the influence of big non-EU players skewing the environment to a large degree.

candu 9y ago

Not necessarily a contradiction - GDPR could have many possible effects; it's too early to claim that these effects will disproportionately harm small companies. One possibility, of course, is that larger companies will have more resources to tackle GDPR compliance, and thus be better able to respond effectively than small companies. However, it's also possible that, by taking privacy / security seriously from day one and storing the minimal set of user data needed to operate, a smaller company will have a distinct advantage over some BigCo that must now migrate sprawling, inter-tangled distributed systems never designed for GDPR compliance. After all, that small company now has a compelling legal reason to avoid feature / data warehousing bloat and save their limited engineering resources, whereas the larger company most certainly has that bloat baked deeply into their stack due to years and years of "Big Data" hype.

kodablah 9y ago
> it's too early to claim that these effects will disproportionately harm small companies. It's not too early to claim that the risks are disproportionate. Those of us with small companies really just count on subjective enforcement. Sadly, it seems everyone says "do nothing wrong, nothing to worry about" with these kinds of laws and don't understand risk management or the cost of conformance.
deltron3030 9y ago
It's not strictness being the problem, it's the uncertainty. GDPR seems like a framework to take out anybody at will, because nobody can really conform to the laws due to that uncertainty. If you do anything really disruptive/innovative, you're probably gonna get problems.
- candu 9y ago
  I really dislike this use of the term "disruptive / innovative" - it's almost a circular definition in this context, since it's effectively being used to mean "anything new that has a high chance of running afoul of the law". English has better words for this sort of thing: criminal, negligent, etc. Launching a new product / service does not give a company carte blanche to do whatever they like, no matter what Uber et al. may prefer to believe. Suppose I want to create a "gun-share" app, because, you know, sharing economy and stuff. I should fully expect that, where laws exist that make this infeasible (e.g. background checks, transfer of ownership laws, etc.), those laws will be enforced. I should also fully expect that those laws might change. If I've been paying attention to the broader world - something that Silicon Valley isn't historically that great at - I should probably have seen this coming for years, since that's how long it takes to build support for legislation. GDPR didn't come out of nowhere; data privacy, security, and ownership concerns have been building for a while now. In the case of the GDPR: my personal position is that it gives EU citizens rights we should all have had from the start with respect to our data. Good on them for passing it, and for giving it teeth. If that tramples on some service that can't be bothered to respect those rights, I couldn't care less - and I say this as a small business owner who's fully aware that, yes, someday I too may face a GDPR compliance request. Maybe I'll be prepared, maybe I won't, maybe it'll never happen; that's part of doing business.

lucideer 9y ago

> That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more and more laws and rules, regardless of the intentions, is the opposite direction You're presenting the situation as a failure of the EU, but I think you've missed the point here. The big players are located in the US because the environment there rewards big players and has a general snowball effect. The EU system rewards small-player innovation and limits the creation of very large, dominant, monopolistic big players. This should be a net benefit to the overall system, if it weren't fot big players just coming in from elsewhere. Unfortunately, due to the global nature of the web, this leads to less-regulated US big players dominating the EU players. Solving that is tough, but the fact GDPR applies to US companies is an interesting start.

kodablah 9y ago
> The EU system rewards small-player innovation and limits the creation of very large, dominant, monopolistic big players. I disagree. Do you believe this is the case today or is it the goal? From what I understand, the gap is quite large between number of small companies based on environment. Many of us with smaller companies stand on the shoulder of giants. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good, and that can mean the financial incentive to become large spurs those of us who are small. Artificial ceilings, however altruistic people tell themselves they are by limiting the big, bad, scary companies, often are just a low tide lowering all boats in a trickle-down way.
- lucideer 9y ago
  > Do you believe this is the case today or is it the goal? From what I understand, the gap is quite large between number of small companies based on environment. You're right, but what I was saying is that I believe it is the case today in the EU to a far greater extent than in it is in the US. That's not saying in any way that the EU is close to an ideal situation, or that there aren't big, dominant EU players. Along with the case of the influence of big non-EU players skewing the environment to a large degree.