There's literally 0 startups I've been part of where data protection laws or even the infamous cookie banners have been anywhere near relevant (unless your business was literally profiling).

In fact the actors that most opposed those laws have always been non Europeans.

Sure, there is an attached cost in having your terms reviewed by a proper lawyer and documenting the entire list of cookie providers, but that's basically where it ends. It's really minimal effort and cost, we talking in the low single digits for the review, and few hours of engineering time.

The biggest issues in European growth are others:

- focus on being an export economy while neglecting the internal market.

- bureaucracy to fight at European level so we still don't have a real unified market, neither in physical goods (our economy's backbone) nor services which doesn't allow national startups to scale at European level

- very conservative and risk-adverse mentality. Young people in college can't wait to graduate and find the best paying lowest effort stable job. That's not a problem if it involves a majority of graduates, I imagine all world is like that, but you do have an immense problem if you have 1% or 3% or 10% of wannabe entrepreneurs.

Going forward, you'll find that the so-called T's & C's (terms and conditions) are dramatically different between commercial and private use. If you get a lawyer involved to sue Meta then the first thing they're going to want to review is Meta's policies and T's & C's and they'll make the assessment if you're violating them. Since they're going to do that anyway, you should have done that at the beginning so you could have avoided this whole mess.

And the sun still doesn't set on our Commonwealth.

Also, Great Britain is an island, not England.

We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.

They still think that the world spins around their navel, that football (soccer) is their game and the sun never sets in their empire.

At the end of WWI, 4 empires collapsed: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian tzar, the Ottoman Empire and the British. The Austrians accepted it and moved on. The Russians and Turkish are in denial and resisting to accept what they already know. The British didn't even get the memo, they're totally oblivious, in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy.

> While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.

Bullshit. People know about Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo, Maseratti, Ducati, Beretta (guns), Carpiggiani (ice-cream machines), La Marzocco, De Longhi (espresso machines), etc.