The European Union versus the Internet

The usage of natural language to write legislations about internet will always create ambiguities and loopholes. I think regulations should be writen in a mathematical language with proof of consistency and unambigous reference implementation of algorithms that are imposed to FAI.

Lets pass a law that states all laws must be written in Haskell!

Best part about it is much fewer laws will be written since so few understand that language.

It's super interesting to watch the reaction of the US blogosphere to EU laws. I feel like I'm learning a lot about US culture just by observing the general attitude that seems to be coalescing against things like GDPR. I used to think that I'd been pretty well indoctrinated into the US value system, despite being born in the EU, just by virtue of having most of my influences (movies, the internet) having come from there. But seeing how much different my attitude is towards all these laws, compared to articles like this one, totally gives me a whole new source of specific little value updates I aught to make if I want to escape from a mindset I suspect isn't optimal in the current economic climate (an EU-based one), to one that is (i.e. an american attitude to things).

In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law.

Everybody is completely and 100% against the copyright law.

There is a huge difference between the two from my point of view:

GDPR is not a law about "The Internet", it is a law about company records. It applies to Google, but it also applies to the Pakistani food stand on the corner. It affects Google a lot more, sure. I support the concept that a company does not have some inherent right to be a steward of my personal data without my explicit consent. GDPR is also easy enough for even tiny startups to comply with, and is significantly easier for small companies than large ones. It does not create a large barrier to entry for new startups or a rift between the existing small and large companies.

The copyright law, however, is a law about The Internet. It controls how businesses interact with the internet. It sets _technical_ restrictions on how they can do so. It sets technical restrictions that are probably not even feasible, at that. It absolutely does create a huge barrier to entry for small companies, and could possibly enshrine the existing tech giants into de-facto monopolies (I mean, if they aren't already...)

The copyright directive is horrible enough on its own. I don't see why everyone is in a rush to pull in mentions of GDPR to make it seem "worse". For a lot of us, it weakens the argument instead of strengthening it. Not everyone likes GDPR, obviously, but we can _all_ agree that the copyright law is garbage.

The problem they were trying to solve was a lack of transparency about what's happening with our data.

Now, I thought I was reasonably engaged on this topic and I thought GDPR was overreach. I also thought I was reasonably careful about giving out my data (sign up to very little, don't use FB etc).

That was until I started to get all the GDPR popups and read about all the places my data was being shipped to. Holy crap I was naive. I've done a 180 on this now and am a buyer. It would have been great in legislation wasn't required but I'm fully onboard with it being needed.