[jfaucett]

There is big difference in law and regulation between intention and real-world effects. For instance, making marijuana illegal has the intention of decreasing drug addiction and dependence but has the effects of disproportionately encarcerating youth aka "criminals" under the new law for drug consumption, and thus limiting their opportunities in the socio-economic system.

If you look into it I think parent is most likely correct with his predictions since they are easily verifiable i.e. big coorps do have massive teams and monetary funds to deal with this legislation, startups and one-man shops do not. This is completely ignoring the deontological question of what should be the case, where I think most would be in agreement.

[matthewmacleod]

big coorps do have massive teams and monetary funds to deal with this legislation, startups and one-man shops do not.

That applies to literally every piece of legislation. Yet we don't decide that small restaurants should be exempt from food hygiene laws, or that small construction teams should be exempt from health and safety laws.

[jakeogh]

Conflating information with feeding someone poison food is so par.

[matthewmacleod]

Your objection is not helpful.

Being careless with personal data has harmful consequences.

Being careless with food safety has harmful consequences.

This is why these things are related.

[walshemj]

what personal data is being exposed - the EU isn't keen on anonymous publishing in general eg in the UK any thing published by a political party during elections etc must have both the printers name and their agents - the penalties are quite severe .

[matthewmacleod]

I'm really not sure what your point is?

[mattmanser]

We haven't seen how they're going to enforce it yet, people throwing tantrums about it doesn't help.

If it's the same as the cookie law or spam rules, they'll come in and say "we've had a complaint, you're doing this wrong, fix it". Then if you don't fix it, they'll fine you.

Not only that, but many of the regulatory enforcers responsible for this in the EU are not particularly well funded and why would they spend the limited resources they have investigating one man bands?

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> For instance, making marijuana illegal has the intention of decreasing drug addiction and dependence

That’s not right, is it?

Didn’t that Nixon aide admit the drug war was a ruse?[1]

1. https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/xd7jkn/a-former-nixon-aid...

[merinowool]

But the public is presented as if its purpose was to curb drug addiction. Could be the same with GDPR - great intentions, but the true reason is to entrench big corporations and introduce more barriers of entry for the small guy, which is inline with socialist agenda.

[simion314]

Are you from US? In EU we had many similar rules that were in the public favor and hit the big corporations, the one I am thinking now is the roaming phone charges, big companies lost a lot of profit from this, so you can see that this big companies do not have the power yet to change the laws for their own profits.

But I see a lot of anti EU sentiments here on HN, anything EU does is painted as anti american or anti startups when from inside EU we see it as for the people/society

[jfaucett]

> from inside EU we see it as for the people/society

No we don't. Some of us do and some of us do not. You are self-admittedly in the former group, I am not.

Also, just because something cost big companies money on one front does not mean it doesn't increase the monopolistic power of said companies and even increase revenues on another. Let me use your own example as a hypothesis we will be able to observationally falsify or not in the coming years. By eliminating roaming charges many smaller companies in the space will have to compensate for the loss of funds and will therefore either have to reduce their current plans, drop service offerings outside of the current country, or eventually collapse entirely. Regardless of the outcome, the total market competition has decreased and ultimately the mega corporations stand to win through decreased overall competition in the space. Additionally, due to lack of monetary incentives, I would expect the rate of innovation in large-scale roaming technology and infrastructure to decrease compared to countries which do not have such legislation.

Socio-economical systems are complex and nonlinear in nature, unfortunately, we i.e. humans have not evolved to think well about nonlinearities neither have we built ourselves sufficient tooling to augment our prediction capabilities for such systems. IMHO, this is the well-spring for the difference between intentions and outcomes in regulatory policy.

[simion314]

I think we should not be afraid of making laws and rules because we are afraid of unintended consequences, if we have such side effects we can update the law.

Your point is that we should not have made the security belt mandatory in cars because there could be a side effect somewhere like a person won't be able to evacuate in time, the idea is to calculate the benefits and the drawbacks and if benefits are much larger then we make the law and update it later.

I am sorry if a small telecom company can't adapt and compete without the roaming charges but we should not pay billions to the big companies so this small company also survives, we can make laws to help small companies like preventing abuses from big companies

[simion314]

We need this law, there are enough terms in it and range on how it will applied so the little guys won't have much trouble if their intentions are to comply.

I know that laws get abused but do you see the OP asking to remove laws that are in his favor like copyright law or patents law?

[merinowool]

And the effect is quite the opposite as consumption of drug and addiction is much more prevalent than in the places where it is legal. So regulation could have good intentions - and a lot of people believe in the intentions - but the effects are the opposite.

[icebraining]

Where are drugs generally legal?

[walshemj]

You just have to look at the effects of the 18th amendment to see the point the OP is making.

In the USA it caused massive increase in organized crime and corruption - the effects of which are still with the US today

[simion314]

But you do not know the effects if all drugs were legal and cheap