Why make these new laws ?
It’s called regulatory capture. The big companies lobby the governments to ratchet up the regulation which benefits them and harms their smaller competitors in case any of them take any market share.
Who benefits ?
Amazon, Ebay, Google, Facebook, Twitter benefit. If small businesses have a massively reduced email list, then they have to either sell their products via the big outlets like Amazon and Ebay, or pay Facebook, Twitter and Google for advertising. Also the big high street stores benefit. Email newsletters act as a little reminder that that great small store you bought from last year is still around. High street stores are hard to forget, so a reminder is not necessary.
It isn’t the consumer, that is for sure. See the video to the right about what you might be saved from! Ironically, my twitter feed always has some EUROPEAN COMMISSION advert that I didn’t ask for in my feed. They auto-play videos at me automatically using up a tiny bit of my monthly bandwidth.
Whatever next … banning memes ? Filtering search results ?
With the EU, you never know how far they will go ….