> I don't think this can all be reduced to "The US tech companies are able to make more money by stealing your data!" as the tech industry is and has been so much more than ad tech.
While it can't be, the EU's ambitions on data protection are quite old; the DPD, the GDPR's ancestor, was adopted in 1995, before the consumer internet was a big deal, and ultimately derives from OECD guidelines from _1980_. Similarly, the EU has been interested in competition issues around things like supermarkets for decades; a lot of effort was put into preventing any one chain becoming the Amazon of supermarkets, so it's perhaps not unexpected that Amazon being the Amazon of, er, Amazons would be viewed with suspicion.
The stuff mentioned in the article seems to be mostly data protection (as mentioned, something the EU has been interested in for the last 30 years at least) and making it easier for people to move services (again, the EU has had an interest in this for a while, notably with telecoms and more recently banks, as well as long-standing rules around bundling).
While it can't be, the EU's ambitions on data protection are quite old; the DPD, the GDPR's ancestor, was adopted in 1995, before the consumer internet was a big deal, and ultimately derives from OECD guidelines from _1980_. Similarly, the EU has been interested in competition issues around things like supermarkets for decades; a lot of effort was put into preventing any one chain becoming the Amazon of supermarkets, so it's perhaps not unexpected that Amazon being the Amazon of, er, Amazons would be viewed with suspicion.
The stuff mentioned in the article seems to be mostly data protection (as mentioned, something the EU has been interested in for the last 30 years at least) and making it easier for people to move services (again, the EU has had an interest in this for a while, notably with telecoms and more recently banks, as well as long-standing rules around bundling).
Honestly, I think the headline is a bit alarmist.