> A lot of people are keen on industry regulations (which GDPR sort of is) but i think are not aware of (a) how bad the bad ones are and (b) the very dominant corporate/incumbent bias they give a market.

I think rather than arguing in general terms that regulation is bad, it is more helpful to address any specific problems you have with GDPR. I've spent a few months looking at it at a small organisation that is having to implement it. My take is that its goals and the way they are implemented look pretty sound.

I don't think that I did. Just pointing out some recurring themes, generally. We don't have that many examples and "regulation" is a fairly squishy category. But, I think anyone who's worked in a business where the word "compliance" comes up regularly has a clear idea of what this means.

Incumbent friendliness is a real concern. In my experience, it is taken as a given by industries facing potential "regulation".

The other side of that is how much mental energy do you give to the ways companies are allowed to lie or mislead. If you’re renting an apartment is the sticker price what you’ll actually pay or are there admin costs both to starting the contract and every month. The UK has recently started to crack down on excessive charges relating to starting a renting contract, with broad positive support.

Idk if it's a case of mental energy. The legal/regulatory toolkit just isn't good. Every little point needs to be detailed, legible and explicit in order to be enforceable. "Informed" just isn't a yes or no point. Boiling it down to such an explicit set of requirements... you can easily boil out all the nutrition.

Oth: it's a calibration process. If the regulations are to onerous, we can loosen them again, or companies will spring up that make compliance easy. https://www.chargebee.com/ solves the European VAT nightmare for example, until we have harmonization on that front. Is it inefficient? Depends on your model of the world: I'd rather pay a bit more for my goods/services and know that my privacy and data autonomy are preserved, and some people might argue that having the freedom of fiscal policy in differing regions is worth paying chargebee their premium. And if we figure out a way to slide into a better pareto point, cool.

>I realize generality and such get in the way of this, but... I think it would have been better if this move specifically targeted the 100 biggest companies, who have the scale an resources to actually use all this tracking data.

then they'd outsource it, hide it, whatever. See: tax laws. Law is like exercise, you can't specifically target abdominal fat,nor can you specifically target Fortune100 excesses

I don't have too much confidence in calibration. The legislative/regulative systems we have are not great at that. Legislation is principles and inflexible. Flexibility requires a more uprincipled, goal oriented approach. Also, goals (mine, anyway) like openness, cosmopolitanism, low barriers to entry and even playing fields... These are hard to measure.

In almost all cases, industry regulation (what this is, more or less) tend to be incumbent friendly. Ie, we could be moderating FB slightly in exchange for killing its future competition.

Some regulation only applies to incumbents, monopoly law for example.