I agree. I don't think GDPR would ever be passed in the US because it is way too heavy a regulation and does absolutely disproportionately impact startups and small businesses. By disproportionately impacting small businesses you stifle innovation and therefore competition.
I do think GDPR is a personal privacy win, but I'm also interested to see what happens in terms of tech startups and new products pulling out of the EU.
the cost of GDPR is almost null for new startups. I provide infrastructure (and tech advice) for data analysts and data scientists (mainly, i also have DL and Blockchain projects) and only one project started last year needed more than a day worth of work, mainly because the infrastructure with both Hadoop and Elasticsearch was weird and the dev who put it together was gone.
I do think GDPR is a personal privacy win, but I'm also interested to see what happens in terms of tech startups and new products pulling out of the EU.