> GDPR actually reduced complexity of rules you had to deal with, some of them imposed since 1998 if not earlier. But as you point out, those rules de facto we

> GDPR actually reduced complexity of rules you had to deal with, some of them imposed since 1998 if not earlier. But as you point out, those rules de facto weren't enforced, and there are lower compliance costs if compliance is optional. The former situation is very bad because it leaves innocent people following the de facto rules at the whims of government officials who can then use violations to punish them for unrelated behavior, so unenforced rules are unreasonable should not be allowed to remain on the books, but that doesn't mean they're the same as rules that are actually enforced. > Pre-unification you often had to deal with them anyway because otherwise you had smaller market But you have the smaller market anyway, if you're small. Suppose you want to create a new credit processing network. You're tiny and just starting out, you don't have the scale of e.g. Visa, but if you can get some local merchants to accept your new card, then you might get some local customers to put it in their wallet. And there might be some states willing to make it easier for you to do something like that because they want a local financial services industry instead of all that money getting hoovered up out of their local economy and into the coffers of New York banks. But then most of the rules for that are federal, and onerous. Some of them are even international treaties. So you can't gain a foothold by starting in a jurisdiction that makes it easy, because the uniform rules make it hard. And then Visa and Mastercard end up with a de facto duopoly.