> I mention regulations in general and not particular one, because the context that you are talking about is placed within bigger context of everything around changing. And once law is put in place is almost never removed.

But you can't connect abstract "regulations" to any kind of bigger context for a cost/benefit analysis. You can for a particular regulation or a particular set of regulations, though.

I believed stuff like "regulations are only added never removed" and "government always grows, never shrinks," but that's empirically false. I read all about how the ICC's regulatory regime was awful in Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, but it turns out by that time it had already been abolished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission....

I don't think it's a bad thing to periodically revisit regulations and revise/abolish them if they're no longer needed or can be improved. However, I think it a lot of cases, regulation is actually a set of solutions to problems, and repealing the regulation will just unsolve those problems.

> Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but researching what do I really need to do, how to register personal data database etc. was high, there were not much info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which kept bots away.

IIRC, I think they do, but from my employer's GDPR training, all you'd have to do is not use the emails you collected for a purpose other than what you obtained consent for. E.g. if you collected them for account maintenance notifications, you can't turn around and build a marketing list from them without getting additional consent from the user.