GDPR: The Geopolitics of the Internet Come to Publishing

We're all going to go on a GDPR ride this year. Recent EU court decisions such as Schrems II invalidated the EU / U.S. privacy shield, which sounds awfully bureaucratic and deadly, and it is both. This means that technology providers and publishers are going to have to get to know the European Union GDPR standard contract clauses or be prepared to localize their user data within the EU. Both of those things are very hard. These changes tie into a larger theme we've been discussing about the geopolitics of the internet playing out over the World Wide Web and even within scholarly publishing. 
 

This year we should expect the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to come up with their own versions of GDPR. In fact, it's already happened with China, and we'll continue to see U.S. states create their own privacy  requirements as Virginia and California have done. These kind of consumer-facing privacy requirements and laws along with sovereign internet schemes like the digital firewall in China will add continued pressures to publishers’ online business, and we can likely expect more censorship of 

scholarly content as a result. For those interested in this area, I'd pay very close attention to announcements or decisions from either Beijing or Brussels. The U.S. is largely on the sidelines.