alt Hacker News> But Americans expect law to in general work more like a list of checkboxes
To me as a European, this is a very low-trust view of lawmaking that assumes a hostile relationship between a government and its people.
The European approach is a bit more of a living conversation.
In the implementation period there's workshops where you figure out how to best comply in a way that makes sense for your business. There's a lot of flexibility there since you're just aiming for the spirit of the law, not some formal definition that might not make sense in your case.
If you're found out of compliance theres a bit of a back and forth and if you put in a good-faith effort to fix things, nobody has any issues.
The advantage of this approach is that the government doesn't tell you how to run your business and things stay agile as new use cases and business models come up.
It works out pretty well in general, and allows for a more cooperative approach to reaching policy goals.
Problems usually only arise when American companies try their bad-faith technicalities and find that doesn't fly here, like when Facebook changed their ToS to try to argue that using their services itself constitutes consent under the GDPR and predictably got dinged for it.
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>It works out pretty well in general
How can you say that when Europe has completely failed at producing any big, successful tech companies in the past couple decades? China and even India have a lot more staetups-turned-bigtech companies.
I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing any of that. It sounds like a reasonable approach and if European citizens like it more power to you.
To me as an American, this is a very high-touch view of lawmaking that sounds like a big problem for companies trying to do new stuff or challenge incumbents. If the meaning of the law is adjusted to fit each individual business case, doesn't that mean the regulator might not let me have all the same adjustments my competitors got? I wouldn't call this a question of hostility as such; even a kind and friendly regulator might think that some of those adjustments depend on doing business as normal, and thus they don't apply to the new abnormal things I'm doing. (Of course, I'm making the stereotypically American assumption that running around disrupting normal business practices is a valuable thing to do.)