By Karina Stan, EU Policy director for Developers Alliance
In April of 2018, I started to receive email after email asking me to opt-in to newsletters and services I’d already been using for years.
I began to notice that some websites I commonly visited were not accessible anymore. Long tails of website banners began to appear, prompting me for permissions and approvals that continue to this day.
The root cause? The EU's newly implemented GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation) had finally gone into effect.
Global standard' not up to scratch?
Praised by the EU as an “overall success,” GDPR was intended as a global standard for consumer-focused privacy practices. The experience for the millions of Europeans who make their living creating software applications and services was anything but positive. Many developers spent time and effort modifying their apps to accommodate the new rules. Some
companies located outside Europe announced that they abandoned the EU market entirely. An example is Unroll.me, which helps users unsubscribe from email spam. If you access this site from Europe, you will still see a message saying that "the service is not available for customers in the EU and the European Economic Area."
After almost three years of implementation, few companies can be assured that they are fully compliant with the GDPR. Having to deal with personal data remains a strong inhibitor for European technology projects of any kind. We've seen this with health researchers who have called for changes to GDPR to better allow for the exchange of health data outside of the EU. All of which was predictable, and all of which was ignored by policymakers before and after the regulation became law.
Something similar is about to happen, but this time the impact could be more far-reaching.
Next wave of regulation
The next wave of EU-driven internet regulation centres on two initiatives: the DSA (Digital Services Act) and the DMA (Digital Markets Act). As important in the long term will be the Commission’s new proposal for “a European approach” to artificial intelligence (AI Act).
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