The GDPR hysteria demonstrates that:
1. Many people (even "rational hacker-types" ha-ha!) do not take the time to research, analyze or understand the regulations and laws that affect them.
2. Many people, even though they don't understand said regulations, will have an extreme negative reaction to the new regulation especially when they see big scary numbers like numbers like "$20M Euro". This is true even of regulations like the GDPR which most anybody should be able to read and understand in a couple of hours.
3. Many people don't understand where regulations come from or how they work. They have no understanding of scope, process, judegement criteria or enforcement vectors. This leads to terrifying visions of "EU cops" waiting at airports to arrest people the moment they get off the plane.
Frankly, the whole situation speaks to the profound ignorance and fear that lies at the heart of the modern nation state. Citizens do not understand the government, they have no understanding of how or why it does what it does, all they really understand is that the government can and will completely ruin them should they violate one the tens of thousands of laws and rules and regulations and decrees that modern governments impose on their domains.
This ignorance has real consequences and costs. You can see this now particularly in Britain where many people are now learning how their country actually works after voting to tear down their current regulatory and economic framework. But you can also see it in all the fear and the moaning and the teeth gnashing every time some new regulation is proposed. (The funny thing here is that even the most hardcore libertarian economists are coming to understand that regulation does not impede economic growth [1]. Indeed there's ample evidence that regulation, by imposing best practices on firms and increasing trust within the market, is a significant driver of economic growth.)
The reason I point this out on HN is because I think, at the end of the day, being an entrepreneur or an investor is all about learning how the world really works and then changing the world to work for you. And while most people can perhaps afford to plod along with all sorts of misguided notions about how the world works because their jobs do not require them to have any real understanding of the big picture, entrepeneurs and investors absolutely cannot. Buffet says it best: "Risk is not knowing what you're doing." The sites shutting down in the face of the GDPR out of fear and ignorance are making the most basic mistake, they literally do not know what they're doing.
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/fe...