@craiggrannell Well, it's a benefit that your absolute sovereignty is feared so much, that the UK's GDPR clone is considered irrelevant?

Yeah, if you would rather not have any say, #brexit was a full success. Big international business simply doesn't care what the “sovereign” UK says.

@craiggrannell It's the small country dilemma, and that applies to the UK despite being almost a magnitude bigger than Austria. (Note that the UK is on a per capita base, about 1/6th poorer than AT)

Point is, and I experienced it as a teenager and student brutally, a small country, either has its own standards ⇾ which results in laughable little choice for consumers, or simply “follows” the norms of bigger fish.

And don't think you can enforce what that standard means on the global players.

@craiggrannell E.g. ÖNORMs have been traditionally 1:1 copied from DIN NORMs. So what exactly is the point of having them? Forcing a qualified person to go over everything to see if they are really 1:1 equivalent?

The Austrian Schilling has been tightly coupled to the German Mark at 1:7 since WWII. The one period where the OENB tried to be more flexible (literally by percent points) didn't work that well.