If meeting these requirements is too difficult for your organization, then that's a sign your organization isn't mature enough to take on the responsibility of

If meeting these requirements is too difficult for your organization, then that's a sign your organization isn't mature enough to take on the responsibility of running this service in the first place. An oil refinery is able to make it another year because they dump all of their waste into the river behind the factory. Proper disposal is expensive and difficult. Is this fine? There's a very valid argument that rules like this would just entrench existing players and hurt startup competition. I'm fine with this. Running globally distributed, massively critical services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc do, is a similarly massive responsibility. Parler incited an insurrection. Telegram is used to incite violence. Jeeze, plenty of this happens on Facebook & Twitter too. We're far, far past the golden days of scrappy startups deserving to be able to connect the whole planet without consequences. The only reason why the oil refinery metaphor sounds so obvious is because we understand the consequences of dumping toxic waste. We understand them, today. We did not understand them 100 years ago. We lived through the consequences, and built laws to dampen them. The internet is, what, thirty years old? Its a baby. We don't understand its impact on society; we want to believe its positive, but we can't say for sure, and there's a ton of evidence pointing to it being just as negative as positive. GDPR is a step in this direction; it does enable existing players to reinforce their moat against scrappy startups. Its especially harsh when one considers that it happened in Europe, which has almost no homegrown mega-tech sector like the US and China do. But, its still necessary. You're saying we should enable tech companies to act with essential impunity because it would be difficult for them to run their services in a way which is ethical and just. I refuse to sacrifice ethics on the altar of capitalism; I don't care how hard it is, and I don't care how much it costs them. As for the legality: Many things are legal, or illegal, until they aren't. The funny thing about laws are, we make them. They're not etched into a big stone on a mountain, forever static.