Episode 37: Second-Class Digital Citizens w/ Brian Chau

Are the citizens of the EU at risk of becoming second-class digital citizens? It’s well known at this point that Europe doesn’t have its own version of Silicon Valley. Many believe that this is in large part due to its digital regulatory approach—the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the AI act, among others. While Congress hasn’t passed a federal privacy law in the US, states like California have enacted rules similar to the EU model—at least on paper. Are the consequences of such regulation overstated? Is it possible to have consumer protection without sacrificing innovation? 

Evan discusses with Brian Chau, former mathematician and machine learning engineer and current research fellow at Alliance for the Future. He’s also the author of the widely-read AI Pluralism newsletter. In a recent piece for Pirate Wires, he argues that Europe’s digital regulations are turning EU residents into “second-class digital citizens.”