If your "innovation" is at risk from consumer protection regulations I question whether it's a good innovation.

There are many examples of successful companies that fall into that category.

Sometimes an innovation needs critical mass to work - social networks for example. LinkedIn famously got big by being extremely aggressive on how they mined your contacts. You'd get sued to the moon and back in the EU for this behaviour.

LinkedIn is big now, it has established itself and no longer needs to be that aggressive. Any European player that tried to enter the market with a less aggressive stance had no chance - they never reached that critical mass.

And we are all so grateful that LinkedIn's aggressive innovation was allowed to flourish.

Bayer would have never invented heroin, if there had not been a market for that and there is a market for that because its a great product. The greatest actually, surpassing all other products, including human society and its the purest form of capitalism. All other products and businesses are just pre-cursors for this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#History

No. Regulations are required so companies produce value rather than exploits. There's no stopping the exploits, especially in an environment where $$$ === speech, but regulation is required for companies to produce value for customers.

A good example is the US "health care" system. It's a meat grinder that exploits everyone and sort of pretends to do what it's supposed to through regulation.

Since the people making the innovations and regulations are different, I fear there’s no way to implement regulation that doesn’t lead to suboptimal results.

And to be clear, when I say suboptimal results I mean misery and death in large quantities.

Yes, but the innovators' incentives don't always align with the needs of the people the regulations should protect.

Regulation are a necessary balance, otherwise the innovators become so powerful they eventually concentrate all the power and privilege and make weaker people pay for it.

Chlorofluorocarbons were an innovation for some times, then we needed regulation to save our ozone layer. Industrial wouldn't have stopped using it.

It's a fine line, constantly moving, an nobody will never be perfectly happy about it.

> We pay the price by having a weaker economy, they pay the price by having less dignity in their life, but there is eventually balance.

It doesn't need to be black or white.

A country can have decent consumer protections without e.g. a tax policy that is hostile to startups. But many EU countries are seemingly uninterested in the latter — presumably because there are no votes in it.

From reading all these messages, I'm curious if an American couldn't try sending a GDPR deletion request by email to some of these organisations. Sure, it only technically applies to European citizens, but it applies to them anywhere in the world — do they really have it on record that you're not one? And of course, if they do a Home Depot style block-all-EU-ip-addresses thing they probably wouldn't care. But in those cases they still break the law, they're just reasonably sure that it will never be enforced against them.

I would imagine the potential legal risk for some orgs would be enough to make them comply, especially those with a European presence (and surely a university like Brown must have both at least one legal entity and enough alumni in the EU for them to count). The worst they could do is say no.

it technically applies to anyone resident in the EEA and UK, as well as citizens of the EEA and the UK abroad