Protecting citizens' data is not, first and foremost, an economic trade-off. It is a societal choice — and one that happens to be economically sound, because it will become a decisive competitive advantage in the global digital contest.
In broad terms, the American model concentrates data in the hands of platforms, and the Chinese model concentrates it in the hands of the state. The European model is the only one that starts from the principle that data belongs to the individual. This is not a technical choice. It is a choice against the prevailing orthodoxy — and a rather liberal one, in that it protects property. Cambridge Analytica did not merely expose platform excesses. It showed, in concrete terms, what it means not to own your own data. The consumer is a citizen first.
Well-designed regulation creates value
That choice has a cost, obviously. It can disrupt processes, force unbudgeted investment, stretch timelines. Every company operating in a data-intensive sector knows this. Stopping there, though, is asking the wrong question.
Peter Drucker said well before the internet that "there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
That is the point. Well-designed regulation does not push you to improve what already exists. It forces you to rethink it. Open banking is the proof: banks were not asked to do the same thing better. They were required to open their data, and therefore to partner with innovation. Services emerged that nobody could have imagined five years earlier.
Two kinds of regulation still need to be distinguished: rules that set outcome requirements create a frame in which innovation can happen; rules that prescribe the means freeze the system while pretending to steer it.
On data, Europe's bet will pay off
GDPR was dismissed as a competitive handicap. It became the global reference, and citizens adopted it. The major US platforms aligned their worldwide practices on the European standard — not out of conviction, but because it became economically impossible to operate otherwise. Proof that a well-set constraint, grounded in a philosophy that protects freedom, can become the norm without stalling growth.
The Data Governance Act, the Data Act, the AI Act, eIDAS, FIDA: all of these regulations impose a trust framework that is already delivering, or will.
Protecting the citizen is a constraint on the market, yes. Tomorrow, it is what the market will demand.
And Europe, having put that principle first, will then hold a competitive advantage nobody can take away.
