European fears about privacy risk cutting us off from America

If, aside from looking at our great website, you sometimes want to see what other newspapers are saying, you may have had a disagreeable surprise – at least if you are in Europe. For, as we have just reported, a number of American media groups have cut off all readers in the EU. These include The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.

The reason is that their publishers don’t want to tussle with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that the EU introduced on Friday. Already there is at least one legal action being taken out against the large US high-tech giants, including Facebook and Google, for breach of data privacy, but for them European users are important and they have huge resources to throw at any court cases against them. For the news outlets noted above, and for many smaller enterprises, the hassle is not worth it – at least not for now. To be frank, for many US publications European readers don’t matter.

I personally will miss the Daily News because it gives a robust, rough-and-tumble feeling for what is going on in the Big Apple, but at least I know that I am missing something. What troubles me more is what I don’t know I am missing, mostly from smaller publishing or promotional groups, because regulation usually favours the big and established, rather than the small and innovative.

It has been a huge irritation to have to answer all the GDPR requests – I reckon I have had more than 100 – but at least there is the compensation of not having to delete all the junk you don’t want to see. But being denied access to information because of a bureaucratic regulation drawn up by unelected officials in Brussels does stick in the craw.

This is nothing like as bad as mainland China, where access to quite respectable websites is frequently blocked, and the motive of Europe in framing the GDPR is completely different from that of the Chinese authorities. But they both have the effect of stopping people in the territory they control from reading news and comment from sources that are available to the rest of the world. The admirable objective of protecting people’s data is having the unforeseen consequence of cutting access to foreign media.

I don’t want to get into the whole misuse of data issue, for this has been exhaustively (and exhaustingly) debated. Rather, let’s look at the growing gulf between mainland Europe and the US, for the approach to privacy is just one of many ways in which the Atlantic and the Channel have widened.

The starting point is that every significant social media group is either American or Chinese – and the Chinese ones have sprouted because China excludes many of the US groups, in practice if not in law. It is not that Europe has a higher standard of privacy protection than the US. It is simply that European standards themselves vary and are in any case different from those in the US. For example, not only does the requirement to carry ID at all times not exist in the UK – we do not even have ID cards. Estonians have digital accounts with the government where all data is stored. All Norwegian tax returns are public. The US does not have the surveillance culture of the UK: New York has it seems some 17,000 security cameras, whereas London has an estimated 500,000. I could not find an up-to-date figure for Paris, but three years ago it had only 1,300. We are all different in our attitudes to privacy.

I don’t think the GDPR is a deliberate attack on the US social media companies, and of course there are legitimate concerns about data privacy everywhere, but in practice the EU seems to be cutting itself off from the US. After all, the GDPR has originated in Europe, not in America.

That leads to a further thought. Social media is one way in which US innovation has come to dominate the rest of the world. There is huge angst, not least in the US itself, about American decline. But this is measurably not true. What is true is that the share of global GDP generated in US has been shrinking thanks to the rise of China. But within the developed world it has been increasing. In 1990 the US economy was smaller than that of the EU. Now it is larger, with the outpacing particularly evident in the last decade.

This GDPR stuff will settle down. But it is just one manifestation of the growing tension between the EU and the US, and that tension will only increase.