Also, must be nice to live in a country where the regulator is as benevolent and reasonable as is described in this article.
I think it's ok for foreigners to be skeptical of this promise, as the article implies that this reasonableness is not encoded in law.
I do have some direct experience of working with EU data protection regulators. My experience has been that they vary wildly in "reasonableness". UK ICO is pretty OK, they want companies to succeed. France's CNIL is a joke. Petty, spiteful and utterly inconsistent. I watched as a company worked closely with them to get their sign-off on a change to their terms of service and privacy policy. CNIL were happy to be involved and taken so seriously, they were satisfied with the changes and even praised them in private. After the company announced the change, some journalists saw an opportunity to make some noise and did so. CNIL then immediately changed their mind and dished out a fine, despite having previously agreed to it. What a farce.
That's at the national level. I can give many examples of cases where the EU has been anything but reasonable.
The entire argument Jaques presents here boils down to his belief that everyone working in GDPR enforcement in the EU will not only be totally predictable and reasonable today but also going forward into the indefinite future.
As pointed out in the other thread, this belief is itself unreasonable, because the nature of the GDPR means that even in the unlikely even it's true today, if in 10 years a new Commission arrives and changes their mind they can retroactively decide that things previously allowed were actually illegal. The GDPR says virtually nothing about anything so they'd certainly argue such a thing was merely a "clarification" and not a retroactive change to the law.
There are plenty of examples of governments doing this sort of thing over time, including the EU, like with Apple's tax situation. Mr Mattheij appears to just write this possibility off entirely.
EXACTLY! There seems to be an almost cultish devotion to the benevolent institution that it can do no wrong, neither now nor henceforth.
I understand WHY people have this belief. The EU is under constant attack at the moment from many sides, and people feel they need to defend it at all costs, even it they are wrong.
You have to trust someone. Either the vast expanse of companies clearly mishandling your data, or the "benevolent" body which so far at least has a fairly good track record. It's not perfect. It's dangerous to give them too much power because you don't know how they will change in the future. But at the end of the day, I'd rather trust a governmental body which is at least supposed to look out for my interests, rather than a company whose main motivation is to exploit me for every penny I have.