[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