Well, that is one way of looking at it. As so often, the rhetoric from Brussels does not quite match the reality.
Last week, Carl Benedikt Frey and Giorgio Presidente of Oxford University published a study that looked at how the rules had impacted the companies that actually had to implement them. There had already been some surveys showing the complexity of the system had damaged investment. Even so, the findings were shocking.
The report found that on average GDPR had reduced sales from tech companies by 2pc. And it had reduced profits by 8pc. Even more seriously it also found it has had a greater impact on smaller companies and left the American tech giants largely unscathed.
“Our estimates suggest that Big Techs have fared relatively well in the age of GDPR,” the report concludes. “Specifically, we find no significant impacts on large tech companies, like Facebook, Apple and Google, on either profits or sales. At the same time, among small companies in information technology, the negative profit impact is double the average effect across our full sample.
“Large technology companies, in other words, have seemingly taken market share from their smaller competitors…and the main burdens of GDPR have fallen on smaller companies.”
In short, it has been a disaster, and one that, like so much regulation, has had precisely the opposite effect to what was expected. In reality, there have been three main problems. First, it has significantly reduced the number of new companies that are launched.
The main impact of GDPR has been to hugely push up the cost of compliance for any kind of business that handles information (and that is just about everyone – it is hard to run a company without holding any kind of data these days).
According to a report from PwC, some European companies are now spending €10m (£8.4m) a year on compliance, and while start-ups won’t need to budget for quite that much, it is still going to eat up a chunk of their capital. The result? We have far less innovation than we otherwise would have.
Next, it has hammered profits. It is significant that while sales have fallen only marginally as a result of the legislation the report found that profits had fallen by four times as much.
It is not hard to work out why. The costs of complying with all those cumbersome rules does not make much difference to the consumer one way or the other. But it comes directly off the bottom line. That matters.
No doubt EU bureaucrats would loftily dismiss profits as no concern of theirs. But without them, investors are less willing to commit capital to new businesses, and existing ones have less to re-invest in expansion.
Again, the result is that we have far fewer companies, and smaller ones, than we otherwise would.
Finally, it increases the dominance of the existing giants. It should be no great surprise that the established mega-companies are the ones least affected by the regime.
They have an endless amount of money to spend on compliance, they can pay for lobbyists to tweak the rules in their favour (Google, Facebook and Apple are now among the five biggest spenders on lobbying in Brussels), and they benefit the most when irritating new companies that might compete with them are kept out of the market.
The EU will never admit that the flagship of its plan to be a “regulatory superpower” has hurt everyone. With declining influence around the world it has set itself the ambition of creating the rules the world has to live by as if tying the whole planet up in red-tape were somehow a lofty ambition in itself.
But it is ridiculous for the UK to still be applying the rules more than a year after we severed our final ties with Brussels.
True, there may be consequences if we break free. The EU may make it difficult to transfer data across the English channel. And yet it is now clear that GDPR cost billions in lost sales and profits – and the sooner we scrap it the better.
