Speaking as a lead engineer at a startup, i.e. someone trying to build a business, I'd much rather have 30 (actually 27 now) potentially incompatible ones. Beca

Speaking as a lead engineer at a startup, i.e. someone trying to build a business, I'd much rather have 30 (actually 27 now) potentially incompatible ones. Because: a) It's only potential incompatibility. Nothing stops governments bilaterally or multi-laterally synchronising their rules when the differences are trivial and unimportant. b) What you describe as potential incompatibility, I call competition. If Spain and Germany wants to go off and try to extract money from Google for the "privilege" of linking to newspapers, they can do that, but it shouldn't impact everyone else. The EU artificially ties together many different policy areas that are unrelated and do not need to be take it or leave it, because they know full well that only a near-fundamentalist opposition to "cherry picking" as they arrogantly call it can ensure the bad ideas are universally adopted along with the good. And as for not having English translations, that's on governments to fix. We live in a world where bilingual English speakers are not exactly hard to find.