> Maybe the whole world is not in the U.S

Not yet. Working on it, though.

>The author seems to live in the UK, but a cursory search suggests there's something similar there as well.

It's pretty fair to assume someone on a USA site, run by an American company, that is a major VC firm based in San Francisco, in an article talking about moving away from another USA company that is located all of 2 miles away from ycombinator, and speaking english should be able to put 2 and 2 together when dealing with contextual information.

If they can't they probably should move to an international focused site.

Federal Trade Commission

An acronym as common as GDPR.

Now I'm curious, how is it called in the UK? I tend to use "FTC" as the general term when I want to refer to a trade regulatory body in a country, as in "UK's FTC equivalent". I wasn't aware it is so obscure?