I’ll note that for real businesses this is just a thought excercise, but it’s one I keep coming back to. What if some less reasonable entity attempted to regulate in this way?
Other countries have already had to deal with the US on this front. If you are a US national you may find it extremely hard to get a bank account in a non-US country, for example; non-US gambling services also have to be very careful about US users (PokerStars et al) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
There are also things like the Magnitsky Act and various other bits of human rights law that allow extremely serious crime and crimes against humanity to be pursued internationally.
The one we'll have to watch out for are Chinese censorship laws going global. There's already some weird side effects of "One China".
1. Invitation to treat: that is offering services for consumption
2. Offer to contract: fulfilling the invitation by making a contract of terms
If you drop a potential customer at step 1, e.g. having your web-server decline the connection based on GeoIP, would that not constitute reasonable effort? We don't have case law regarding GDPR yet but I would certainly argue that it shows efforts being taken to exclude EU residents.
Welcome to our world :)
> The whole internet dances to the US tune, legally.
You've got that almost exactly backwards. The US approach has required almost no dancing at all to the US tune. That's precisely why ~4 billion people can use the Internet from 195 nations, all with dramatically varying laws. They're not adopting US law to use the Internet. That's why the Chinese have been able to implement their unique approach and still use the Internet (restricted to fit their tolerances at a government level).
You very specifically do not have to dance to US legal tunes to use the Internet. Even when it comes to IP laws, you do not have to dance to the US tune (Europe has varied widely from the US on such, eg as it relates to piracy, and yet the Internet keeps on regardless).
Same thing with the internet: the US was the biggest developed country, it had a large, stable, rich internal market, it had big universities churning out graduates (many of them coming from other countries!), it was the inventor of many tech things that make up the internet. So of course a less regulated internet would benefit it since its companies were best positioned to take advantage.
My guestion for the next 30-40 years: unless China screws up badly, it will overtake the US. It's simple math: a moderately rich Chinese population will overtake the US one, as it outnumbers it 4 to 1 or so. Will the US be as benevolent and open when it's the underdog?
Based on some reactions I've seen here, regarding the EU and the GDPR and also on reading a ton of comments about China, I'm not so convinced.
TL;DR: The US is reasonable, for a super power, but it didn't do it out of the goodness of its heart.
US benevolence will increase in direct proportion to the extent that it isn't the sole global superpower (realistically it has been the sole superpower since WW2, the USSR power projection was mostly a facade, as it always had a terrible economy). Its perceived role as global policeman, has put it into an endless number of ridiculous positions (both politically and militarily). The less the US believes it has to be the prime actor in that regard, and the more the US has to inter-operate with everyone else in a normal fashion, the less obnoxious it will be about a lot of things. It will be able to semi-normalize back to closer to how other major nations behave.
Obviously the US will remain an outsidzed global superpower. Its economy and military scale alone will ensure that. However the coming future in which China is a real rival that can stand toe to toe, will force a number of fascinating adjustments to all politics around the globe (and I mean not just to US politics, all politics for all countries).
The real question to ask is, will China be benevelont with its future power? Look at what they're doing to their people right now for the answer (vast Muslim torture camps like the Mao days, where people are being forced with violence and psychological torture to give up their Islamic beliefs; literally torturing homosexual people to convert them away from homosexuality; restricting "homosexual speech" because it's anti-Socialism; wiping out what limited speech the people of China had acquired; using its military to annex the South China Sea away from its neighbors, which is 4x the size of France or Texas; etc). Now consider for a moment that that is China just getting warmed up as a global power, and consider what other horrific things they may choose to do under dictator Xi (dictatorships have a near universal record of getting worse, rather than better, as it pertains to human rights).
Consider that China has begun an aggressive expansion of its military outside of its borders (laying down plans to build numerous foreign military bases to give it global projection capability). Now one might fairly criticize the US for its global military expanse; however the US hasn't used its might to annex nations or territory globally, it hasn't actually acted as a traditional empire (ie Ramstein military base in Germany is no threat such that the US might suddenly attempt to annex Germany). Meanwhile China routinely threatens to invade Taiwan and annex it, they get upset if you so much as recognize Taiwan as an independent nation or talk to its leader directly. Maybe next week China will decide that Mongolia too is a proper part of the greater China strategy.
So with that growing power, is China suddenly going to become a soft benevolent giant? Or will they get worse? I think the answer is obvious and the planet should be terrified about what's coming. The entire Chinese approach is incompatible with democratic values across the board, and they are without question going to throw their weight around as it pertains to censorship (they already are). They're currently busy buying up Eastern Europe and using their investments to get countries like Greece to block actions against them as it pertains to eg the South China Sea. Imagine a world under the reign of Xi, forced by threat (direct or implied) to comply with how the the CPC operates China today. If people thought the US superpower behavior was bad (a democratic nation with vast human rights protections), that's going to be 10x worse.
- the IP, under GDPR, is personal data. You need consent or a legitimate interest to process it.
- it is very murky regarding EU persons abroad. So if I operate with a German citizen originating in Hong Kong, I may be subject to the law.
Personally, I think that you'll be fine blocking EU IPs as long as you aren't doing anything more with them, but that doesn't change the philosophical problem.
Someone else, through proactive work on their part, came to my site (say hosted outside of the EU), even though I did not want them to and I am on the hook for a law I had no agency in creating.
Again, largely a thought exercise and not a real problem for real businesses, but it does beg the question...are websites liable for every law in the world? Do we just fall back on the 'well they can't enforce it' model of evaluating website legislation?