>But there was a curious pattern to GDPR enforcement: while smaller, EU-based companies were swiftly shuttered by its provisions, the US-based giants that condu

>But there was a curious pattern to GDPR enforcement: while smaller, EU-based companies were swiftly shuttered by its provisions, the US-based giants that conduct the most brazen, wide-ranging, illegal surveillance escaped unscathed for years and years, continuing to spy on Europeans. (...) One (erroneous) way to look at this is as a "compliance moat" story. In that story, GDPR requires a bunch of expensive systems that only gigantic companies like Facebook and Google can afford. These compliance costs are a "capital moat" – a way to exclude smaller companies from functioning in the market. Thus, the GDPR acted as an anticompetitive wrecking ball, clearing the field for the largest companies, who get to operate without having to contend with smaller companies nipping at their heels. This is wrong. (...) A harder look at what happened with the GDPR reveals a completely different dynamic at work. The reason the GDPR vaporized small surveillance companies and left the big companies untouched had nothing to do with compliance costs. The Big Tech companies don't comply with the GDPR – they just get away with violating the GDPR Nothing about what he wrote refutes the GDPR being a "compliance moat". In fact, he even spells it out himself: "And that's why Google and Facebook haven't been extinguished by the GDPR while their rivals were. It's not compliance moats – it's impunity. Once a corporation attains a certain scale, it has the excess capital to spend on phony relocations that let it hop from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, chasing the loosest slots on the strip." He has the idea that a requirement is only a compliance moat if a small player can't comply (because of complexity, costs, etc), but a big one can. But it's fine for the "compliance moat" purposes that the small player can't comply and the big player can just ignore compliance. It's still a great moat, and it can still be consciously created as a moat: "Let's put out a law that makes it difficult for small players to do this shit, and we big players have avenues to bypass").