If individual states each enact individual laws governing the internet, then only large companies will have the resources to follow them.
We'll see a balkanization of the web wherein it's no longer very world wide. Small internet businesses will become harder and harder to start. Big monopolies will become entrenched.
It's not pretty.
It's small-business webapps that have problems. But I would be very glad for those to stop doing so many terribly sketchy things that have become the norm on this consumer-unfriendly internet we're dealing with.
So like I'm super afraid of a "regulated internet", but I'm also super sad by what's happened while it's been unregulated. Businesses, governments, even ICANN have done terrible things to the internet. I'm not very optimistic for any outcome anymore.
The law is already so complex that even within a single country or a state, people who study it need specialisations. Regulators have no grasp regarding existing laws or full extent of laws they are voting for. It's madness.
Small business that government or a big company doesn't like can already be killed by thousand cuts because they don't have infinite amount of money to spend on lawyers.
Not having both of those is a good thing, so I see no downside.
Article 2 of GDPR defines the scope of the law.
> This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity
Re analytics part from another comment, I only care how they interact with my website. Without sharing that info with anybody. You could avoid cookies if you really wanted to but then you actually collect more data about your visitors.
What you refer to as “analytics” is actually stalking and I’m glad we have regulation around it now.
By the way, you don’t need to display a warning, you need to ask for consent in a non-intrusive way (consent should be freely given).
Or just you know, don’t stalk people. Seems like an easy enough solution.
And as long as state laws are limiting abusive behaviors, I don't see what the problem is -- then we all follow the new "floor" and the whole country benefits. A small start-up can not choose not to lie about a bot being a person just as easily as a tech giant can.
The problem is if local laws conflict with each other or impose a significant burden. But then the federal government generally steps in quickly and shuts things down thanks to the interstate commerce clause.
So I don't think there's anything to worry about here.
I accept the general premise of your point, but this particular law isn't asking anything onerous. The societal benefits that come from limiting the ways in which political and commercial bots can decieve the public are just too great to claim this is a bad thing.
2) Commerce and communication restrictions should not be considered without also considering the purpose and benefit the legislation intends to cause. First and foremost is whether it actually helps more than it harms. For example, it could have been (and I'm sure was) argued that abolishing slavery was problematic from the standpoint of groups of people and businesses interacting with those states and what it meant to use slaves in them or take slaves to them. The point is not to equate this issue with the abolitionist movement, but to point out that how the law affects interactions between states may have very little (or very great) bearing on whether it should be ratified, and it depends entirely on the legislation in question. Great leaps in both positive and negative directions both cause friction between (nation)states, so friction itself is a poor indicator of whether legislation is good or bad.
The "laboratory of the states" thing is a legal nightmare in a networked world, but it's inevitable under the current organization. Well-crafted nation rules would be better, but a lot of people seem to want it this way.
For generations people who wanted to do business in another jurisdiction had to follow the law of that place, even if it meant physically traveling there or opening a store.
Internet businesses would still have things much easier, as a change in software can be done by someone working from home or in Chennai or what have you- without any capital expenditure.
Dont make this out to be armageddon- it’s not.
Or taking the European GDPR regulations as an example actually caring a little bit more about the user' data and enabling informed consent.