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by AnthonyMouse
2179 days ago
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> Businesses claim that it makes it harder to do business (but they say that about any legislation). To be fair, it tends to be true of any legislation. Even if all you're doing is passing a law ordering them to do what they were already doing, now they've got to pay lawyers to tell them that and auditors on a recurring basis to make sure it continues to be true even if it would have regardless. And then the cost of that gets passed on to customers and employees, because laws apply to everybody which means raising prices due to compliance costs isn't a competitive disadvantage when everybody does it. (Or they don't apply to everybody and give advantage to foreign competitors.) The costs also disproportionately impact small businesses, because the compliance cost is a fixed amount whether you have a million dollars in revenue or a billion, so regulation is effectively the most regressive form of taxation. (Compare this to taxing Facebook and using the money to fund privacy-protecting open source technologies.) |
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As someone who's been running small tech businesses in the UK for a while, I think it's also fair to say that the GDPR was unusually onerous even for government regulations. Over the past decade or more, only the VAT mess was comparable for anything coming out of the EU that I've been involved with. The similarities in those two cases are striking.
Each was meant to address a legitimate and well-established problem with how big businesses operate. Each also caused disproportionate expense and hassle for small businesses, even if those businesses weren't the intended targets and what they were doing was basically OK before.
Each had significant ambiguities that were either open to interpretation or missing key details, and so probably needed expert advice on compliance in many cases.
Each required businesses to change their record-keeping, documentation and processes for compliance, even if the substance afterwards was still much the same as before in each case.
Also, in each case enforcement seems unlikely for smaller businesses, so those who either didn't know about the new rules or wilfully ignored them gained an advantage over their competitors who were making a good faith effort to comply. I don't like good people being penalised just for trying to run their businesses legally and responsibly.