I agree with your general point that the EU does not know how to make life easy for small businesses.
However, your examples are not the best: GDPR and Cookie Law are actually quite good. Regarding the GDPR, I like being able to obtain all the data a business has on me, and to demand that it be deleted. As for the Cookie Law, it’s only a problem for websites using them for tracking people: you are not required to get agreement from the user to use cookies for things like logging in.
Those annoying pop-ups almost everywhere are a disinformation campaign to turn users against that law.
Now, there are other things like the Link Tax you mentioned and the MOSS (VAT on digital services), which means having to charge/pay different VAT rates depending on the user’s country (which you need to justify with 3 different pieces of evidence) that are a big burden on small businesses while not affecting much the big ones to which they were supposedly directed.
> The end effect of those Bizantine regulations is that big companies just use them as loopholes while small businesses get weighted down with them.
Yeah, this is exactly the issue.
I work in Finance and the right to be forgotten / right to deletion is a pain, as it doesn't apply to invoices (needed for financial reporting for 10 years), but can apply to the user ID, etc. which makes it tricky. It's doable in a big company though, even if it's a headache.
But for example, I live in a housing co-operative, and there the laws really become a pain. Like we wanted to use the CCTV to better enforce treatment of communal areas, but you can't without a police report, etc., and we wanted to build a better portal for residents but then there are lots of issues with the GDPR, etc. - like all just little hurdles that get in the way of iteration and innovation. Especially for something like that which is basically part-time among residents.
> But for example, I live in a housing co-operative, and there the laws really become a pain. Like we wanted to use the CCTV to better enforce treatment of communal areas, but you can't without a police report, etc.
I also live in a housing cooperative and I'm glad these laws exist. They protect me from some neighbors that want to set up CCTV everywhere because somebody once saw a kid in the yard that he didn't recognize so must be a burgler (dark skin tone I might add), and because some neighbors don't fold their cardboard boxes properly in the recycling room. And for that BS I and all neighbors should be put under permanent video surveillance in all common areas on the property? No way, I'm glad the law prohibits that.
>I agree with your general point that the EU does not know how to make life easy for small businesses
Is this even an EU specific thing?
I set up a company in the UK, and the only thing I needed was a number to do tax returns. The only other required thing is the tax returns, and that only gets you to the level of the typical American who has to do tax returns anyway.
> Those annoying pop-ups almost everywhere are a disinformation campaign to turn users against that law.
I think it's just businesses not knowing, and Googling a service, and installing that service which introspects their cookies and shows them to users with an obnoxious popup.
Some of it are bigger companies being deliberately obtuse and making it as hard as possible to uncheck the tracking cookies.
Then a bunch of mid-size companies who just do what the big guys do because if they do it, it must be fine.
If everyone who just use cookies for session tracking (which is perfectly fine) woulds stop asking, we could better differentiate the bad ones from the good ones.
> If everyone who just use cookies for session tracking (which is perfectly fine) woulds stop asking, we could better differentiate the bad ones from the good ones.
Agreed. My experience was slightly different: we used cookies purely for login, and our legal person still just heard "cookies" and so we needed a consent popup.
However, your examples are not the best: GDPR and Cookie Law are actually quite good. Regarding the GDPR, I like being able to obtain all the data a business has on me, and to demand that it be deleted. As for the Cookie Law, it’s only a problem for websites using them for tracking people: you are not required to get agreement from the user to use cookies for things like logging in.
Those annoying pop-ups almost everywhere are a disinformation campaign to turn users against that law.
Now, there are other things like the Link Tax you mentioned and the MOSS (VAT on digital services), which means having to charge/pay different VAT rates depending on the user’s country (which you need to justify with 3 different pieces of evidence) that are a big burden on small businesses while not affecting much the big ones to which they were supposedly directed.
MOSS: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-digit...
The end effect of those Bizantine regulations is that big companies just use them as loopholes while small businesses get weighted down with them.
Your last line summarizes it well: “The EU is to the German establishment what the USSR was to the Russian establishment.”