The European union has evolved from the European Economic Union, and they are generally pretty pro-business and pro-freedom. One thing you want to keep an eye

The European union has evolved from the European Economic Union, and they are generally pretty pro-business and pro-freedom. One thing you want to keep an eye on that is actually harmful to business (and economic freedom) is if some part of the economy gets caught up in a race-to-the-bottom. This is a situation where everyone's best move is to defect, and then defect again, all the way down until no one is free/making a profit/happy/etc anymore. In this case there is a clear race to the bottom situation where everyone ends up having to track everything about everyone, just to keep up with the competition. As this would be pretty much truly be a panopticon-like tyranny by any other name, that's clearly not desirable. In this case the EU is trying to make legislation that stops the race from going all the way down, by leveling the playing field so that everyone can conveniently say "see, we can't go further because it's actually illegal now". So the net (long-term) freedom is actually increased by this measure.