The rational panic we see in the flurry of emails we‘ve all been getting, with subject lines of varying degrees of grief, and often with plaintive appeals to re-join previously vibrant subscriber communities now being split apart by regulatory pressure, reveals fundamental defects in the regulation‘s implementation. As does the blocking of EU users by terrified entities afraid that doing so is the only way to cope with the GDPR‘s troubling scope.

The GDPR‘s list of infirmities is long, ranging from its complexity and corresponding ambiguity, to some notably expensive requirements, to the lack of harmonization among crucial aspects of member states‘ local implementations, to the failure of many of these member states to produce these local regulations at any point usefully in advance of today, and to the GDPR‘s untested global reach. And they fairly raise the concern that the GDPR is poorly tailored to its overall policy purpose.