You are absolutely fragmenting the internet.

We had PII on Azure. We wanted to do business in France. We had to fork our services, and run a full stack on a crappy provider in France. They charged a lot more, would take weeks of vacation with zero support for us. It was a freaking nightmare.

EDIT: I love the responses I'm getting. People are in absolute denial that this does in fact fragment the internet. You may believe that's a good thing, and that's a rational discussion we can have. But don't lie to yourself, or to me, that this doesn't fragment the internet.

I think fragmentation and looking after one's interests aren't even opposites. Analytics in particular seem like a very lopsided value prop: the american entity (Google) stands to gain from collecting analytics but doesn't really provide a perceivable equivalent value through the analytics service to the affected parties (EU consumers) in return, as you'd normally expect in a fair trade policy between two countries.

Looking at it from this angle, it seems perfectly reasonable for the EU to dislike the specifics of the analytics use case while still being ok with something like Google Docs.

Perhaps it's a fragmented internet that is best aligned with our own interests.

I, for one, would really like to have more fragments to explore.

> We're not fragmenting the internet by looking after our own interests.

Of course you are. This is the only possible outcome of any attempt to impose national rules on an international network. Instead of one global network, we'll end up with several local ones.

The internet is among the most incredible achievements of humanity. I'm glad I got to experience it before they destroy it. By now it's only a matter of time.

This is a great response to OPs comment.

At the end of the day we should be doing what is good for the People and somehow its always assumed that they will/should be the ones impacted when policies like these are enacted.

But Europe has leverage here - I don't think Amazon would want to miss out on a giant market base out of some moral principle and there are probably other levers to be pulled here to encourage that.

Anyway, not adding much to your comment other than kudos.

> On the contrary, it only forces those providers to have a European presence.

All the big cloud providers have presences in Europe. What am I missing here?

> On the contrary, it only forces those providers to have a European presence.

If the EU has this much power to regulate operations that happen in America, then imagine how much worse it's going to be if you relocate your operations to the EU? In that case you actually become one of their subjects, rather than simply recording information about their subjects.

Wow

> Agencies can snoop on non-US citizens but shouldn’t snoop on US citizens

and they went and snooped on US citizens anyway.

If by those providers you mean Google, AWS etc. then that might not solve much. As subsidiaries of American corporations they would be obligated to hand over data to the parent corp, especially if the US DOJ required it.

I think the only solution would be for them to not collect and store data from GDPR jurisdictions that would violate the GDPR if they were forced to hand it over to the parent American corp.

the EU is shrinking in importance in terms of the world economy [1]

another 20 years and companies simply won't bother with it at all

[1]: https://fullfact.org/europe/eu-less-important-world-economy/

> On the contrary, it only forces those providers to have a European presence.

It’s interesting to see the pattern here: if you can’t innovate, regulate.