Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rock_hard 2721 days ago
This is a double edged sword...in the EU it doesn't matter because they didn't have a internet economy to begin with but here in the US a lot is at stake.

So if you want better privacy laws in the US then they have to be much more clever than GDPR to not destroy the economy and global competitiveness!

BTW: Personally I think it is possible to do better than GDPR here in the US.

1 comments

As a percentage of GDP the so-called "digital economy" isn't much less in the EU than in the U.S. See, e.g., https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/PP/2018/02281...

Excluding the U.K. and Ireland (tax haven) the difference between the EU and U.S. is greater, but (eyeballing) only on the order of 30-50%--e.g. ~4% vs ~6%.

What's more surprising is how small the share of GDP is the digital economy in the U.S.

That said, "digital economy" may be a poor proxy for understanding the impact of privacy regulations. It's a superset of tech industries, including much more than those parts which broker private information and to that extent would overestimate the impact. OTOH, I presume "digital economy" excludes large parts of non-tech industries (i.e. traditional sales and marketing companies, TV and newspaper ads, etc) and thus underestimates the potential impact.

I guess it depends on your definition of digital economy...I was referring to companies of the size and influence like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Airbnb, Tesla, SpaceX, etc