Just the other day I ended up in a discussion with a US citizen (it started completely harmless and away from culture/politics) and ended up in the same corner: "EU is bad because it limits your freedom, US is great because it gives you freedom". The problem is - the argument (my understanding of the interlocutor) was about companies, and what they can do.
In my view, in Europe there is a bigger pressure to value people/individuals over company/corporate interest and that's seems like the crux of the difference.
I think it’s more about two different definitions of freedom. The U.S. defines it as the freedom to choose, where harmful outcomes are an accident of letting people freely choose. The E.U. sees it more as the freedom to live, where choices that harm quality of life need to be restrained.
The EU constrains companies to the benefit of individuals. It's not stopping people from hurting themselves, it's stopping them from being hurt by companies who have phenomenal power over us, more power in some ways than states themselves have.
Whatever criticism the EU attracts for its spending, the PR budget looks to be pretty good value. I'm really baffled by some of these perspectives.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-euro...
Also, your 30K figure also includes lobbyists from civil rights groups and other NGO's. Not just purely companies.
Lobbying happens, it is how people influence politics. Better to be transparant and open about it them to hide it.
[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2015/57280...
To American values, restrictions on how you do business are as infringing as restrictions on individual rights.
Along that same line of thinking, I think another historical American value/attitude is that a business is a person. More precisely, businesses only exist because individual people decide to take risks with their lives in the pursuit of whatever values they hold. Since they hold the risk privately, they get to hold the rewards privately.
That many people who take such risks value financial profit may be a concern to some, but is a non-concern to society as long as the marketplace is free of coercion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
Here's one of the many articles about what's wrong with it.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright-proposal...
Maybe we could try to find a single US law that we don't like and dismiss America just as readily?
In limiting businesses more in the EU I found out that it generally means less competition and fewer companies (per capita) than the US, in my limited experience of having lived in the EU most of my life before moving to the US and still visiting Europe every year. One of the most common shocks of moving to the US from Europe is the sheer number of options/choices that you have/can make for every little thing. Back in Europe there was 1-2 supermarket chains, here there are much more. Same for food (fast or otherwise), insurance agencies, banks/credit unions, broker services, pension funds plus countless small stores (not national chains). In most interactions I have in the US I really do feel that "the customer is always right" (there are lots of exceptions to that rule but you will generally see those exceptions also happen because of lack of competition) while in Europe most of the interactions I had as a customer meant I would have to either beg for something or get angry about it/make a scene in order to make progress on an issue.
There are also deeper cultural differences in criteria customers use to pick one company or the other. In the US people seem more willing to vote with their wallets and do not look back while I feel much less of that happening in Europe.
It's hard of course to generalize across such large and varied populations and economies but this has been my experience and it does align with logical explanations of consequences of limiting businesses more or less in a free market environment.
The sentence reads funny as if people/individuals don't own companies. A better way to put it would be that they value some kinds of people over other kinds of people. Or users over entrepreneurs, or something besides just the ambiguous "people".
Yet a common US reaction was to view GDPR as something draconian and anti small business, and to deliberately misunderstand that a maximum penalty wasn't going to be the always penalty. Much like this blog post does.
On the copyright proposals those same people here in the EU are unanimously against.
This is the only way to view penalties like this that don't have clearly defined criteria. It's all up to a judge, and when so much is at risk, a company will assume the worse.
This just sort of proves the point the poster was making. People here don't assume that the worst case is going to happen. Most sorts of these laws so far result in initial action taken to help (or force) the company to comply. Fines are usually only considered for those who repeatedly refuse to come into line.
My view of the US is that there are many more aggressive public prosecutors who will swing for maximum penalties, in order to make a name for themselves.
But maybe I just watch too much tv.
Nobody but the national regulatory instance of each country can sue, and they are in general not very happy on legal procedures.
In practice, a common Euro-pattern is this: First, a sternly worded private letter is sent to the target company. If that doesn't help, a public statement is made. After that, basic legal procedures for a small amount. The amount gets larger when the abuse is more flagrant and previous messages did not help. When the target company seems to co-operate reasonably well, no legal procedures are even started.
How is that a bad thing to do? Pretending that the worst result couldn't happen is just delusional - it is like people who don't wear seat belts or helmets, or don't buy insurance. Just because something is unlikely doesn't mean you should ignore the risk, especially when the consequences of the unlikely even are so high.
Yes, the maximum penalty is probably pretty unlikely; on the other hand, if you GOT the maximum penalty, it might be a death sentence for your company. When the stakes are that high, you can't just ignore the risk.
But it won't. You attempt to comply with the rules, show good faith and you won't be in danger.
It's not a real risk.
So the moment some group "wants to make an example of your company", not that I have ever heard of anyone being made an example of that's remotely akin to US punitive damages awards or 999 year Texas jail sentences, you appeal to the national or EU court. The judge will be delighted to rule the regulator's (or government) actions illegal or disproportionate. It may well also trigger a judicial review.
For an alternative outcome you would require a change in representation at the EU from 27 nations, and repeal of one of the founding principles. Not as unthinkable as the US repealing the constitution, but not very far off.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#European...
Existing laws we already operate under have much more severe maximum penalties than people realize, and judges are (relatively) reasonable at applying them correctly. Right here in the US, nearly everyone is technically violating some law every day, the key is ensuring that our justice system has the mechanics in place to deal with clear violators, while having adequate redress for improper application of the law.
The copyright law is much the same. No, memes will not get banned by it. Yes, Google News will have to pay for the content they scrape. No, you will not get hunted down by the copyright gestapo for sending a link to a friend.
I don't think the system is working well at all. We have a situation where vague laws with severe penalties allow prosecutors to grossly overcharge. This is then used to coerce the accused into waiving their rights to a trial, in return for the certainty of a more limited punishment.
In Germany "deals" are very much not liked by the law profession, and only a very limited form of it has been put into law. And even that is very sharply debated in the profession.
Add to it that prosecutors actually do look for mitigating circumstances, and do not regularly appeal a verdict that they feel is a bit too low, thus preventing the appellate court from handing down a harsher sentence, making the appeal risk-free for the defendant.
It's not all roses here, but you also shouldn't assume that this "either plead guilty and accept five years or risk three hundred years" is a universal property of judicial systems.
Guilty pleas do usually result in lower tariffs, but AFAICT we have little to none of the horse-trading that's continually portrayed on US television.
Then we'll reverse any of these positions at the drop of a hat. I'm not saying we're RANDOM, I'm saying it can look so. There might be dozens of upcoming responses to this comment, each suggesting a different "simple" solution ("It's about self-interest" "It's about freedom" "it's about personal responsibility") but they will all either fail to reconcile, or give you a simple explanation that is nonetheless hard to extrapolate how the public will respond to a given topic.
My personal opinion is that neither the EU nor the US has an optimal economic outlook, but it may not be possible to have one - it's hard to combine the benefits of rugged individualism with the benefits of communal cohesion. Hard to mix diversity with unity.
It's actually not that hard. You can have a mexican restaurant, hibachi restaurant, cajun restaurant and winery all in the same city and patronize a different one each day. That's the benefit of diversity.
What doing it wrong looks like is accusing the mexican restaurant of a moral failing because their staff is mostly latino, or the winery because their staff is mostly English or French. You don't maintain diverse cultures by requiring every place to be formed of exact proportions of statistically precise homogenized diversity paste, you get them by having clumps of different cultures near each other that trade and learn with each other while continuing to possess their own discrete cultural identities.
All unity requires is coexisting without fighting each other.
The fact that some people do it wrong doesn't mean there isn't a way to do it right.
And that's also why you see people on both sides of any given issue. A diverse country does not have a homogeneous people.
> And that's also why you see people on both sides of any given issue
Often that's a great thing. Sometimes it's not. That was the point I was making.
I won't claim to know what the "optimal mindset" is, but I think it's obvious that both the US and the EU have made many blunders in recent history, economically and otherwise. I'm sure if there is an optimal mindset, it is one that learns from those of the US, EU, Asia, etc. and takes the best of each (not necessarily in equal proportions, of course).
Knowing different cultures, contrasting them and making your own choices will always be superior to being "indoctrinated" (voluntarily or not) into one.
* In the US: Don’t use social media if you don’t want to be tracked, it’s your choice.
* In the EU: We cannot compete against big US companies so we will pass laws that are popular with entitled people to weaken them in the name of social benefits. Win-win for politicians.
It's not about weakening companies, it's about keeping them in line, ethically.
Which is to say, I'm an American who's wildly in favor of the EU's regulatory changes to reign in big tech, but when you consider how many different individuals or organizations are by FAANG companies, the media perspective on these laws can be... tainted by self-interest.
Also note that movies and TV are often oddly at odds with even the industry that creates them. For instance, Hollywood is notoriously liberal (to the point that conservatives have to hide their political affiliation), and hence very pro gun control. Yet if you've seen many of our movies, you might have noticed that building props for Hollywood is a statistically significant portion of the gun manufacturing industry!