GDPR, China and data sovereignty are ultimately wins for Amazon and Google
The article lays out its thesis pretty well. In the wild wild days of little regulation on personal data, everyone vacuumed up as much as they could, because it might be useful someday, and there were few laws with teeth to stop them. Usually, this was used for analytics and &#x27;big data&#x27;, but frequently, it cycled back into targeted ads. Entire conglomerates made most of their revenue this way: Google, Facebook, Verizon+AOL+Yahoo. I&#x27;m not sure Amazon really fits here, because they make most of their money by selling you actual things (compute, products) rather than your data to an outside party, but they do collect a fair bit of data about one&#x27;s preferences, so let&#x27;s keep them here.<p>Now, the door&#x27;s been shut behind them. It&#x27;s fair to assume that big companies are better equipped to hire experts to navigate the issue of compliance than a random 8-person startup fresh off the press;  whereas 10, 20 years ago these exact sort of new ventures are what grew into data harvesting machines that were usually acquired by someone with bigger wallets. This is one of the mechanisms of regulatory capture: even if the law is good for the public, most of the companies that engaged in the now-illegal tactics can pivot to something else or figure out how to stay in compliance, while any new players hoping to use the same mechanism are forbidden from doing so. This is a fairly typical outcome when regulation is first applied in a space where it wasn&#x27;t before.<p>The twist is that some of the same players that engaged in the harvesting and trafficking of personal data have also branched out into cloud computing and various value-add SaaS to sell B2B, and they can capture some revenue from other companies that are just going about their everyday business and are looking to stay compliant with the new regulation. This is a boon for the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, who&#x27;ve engaged in both targeted ad tracking and cloud computing. Increased uptake in their cloud offerings will help insulate them from the tightening of the targeted ad space.<p>The substance of the article is solid. But for those alleging FUD, keep in mind that TechCrunch is owned by Oath, the content subsidiary of Verizon, a content and infrastructure company without a strong story in B2B cloud computing, and whose revenue is chiefly derived from (1) providing bulk telecom interconnect, (2) being an ISP, both wired and wireless, and (3) correlating user behavior across their portfolio of sites and using their network. One can easily make the case that these sorts of companies are among the most vulnerable to this sort of regulation.