Regulating Privacy Online: The Early Impact of the GDPR on European Web Traffic & E-Commerce Outcomes

European Privacy Law and Global Markets for Data

“…We add to a growing empirical literature on technical and commercial implications of the GDPR, and relate to theoretical work on its implications for competition policy. This literature spans across disciplines, including industry reports (WhotracksMe, 2018), and academic work in computer science and communication (Dabrowski et al, 2019;Solomos et al, 2019;Hu and Sastry, 2019;Degeling et al, 2018;Libert et al, 2018;Sørensen and Kosta, 2019;Urban et al, 2020), marketing (Johnson and Shriver, 2020;Goldberg et al, 2019;Goddard, 2017), information systems and economics (Godinho de Matos and Adjerid, 2020;Zhuo et al, 2019;Sharma et al, 2019;Lefrere et al, 2019;Jia et al, 2019b,a;Aridor et al, 2020), and law (Gal and Aviv, forthcoming;Geradin et al, 2020).…”

The impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on internet interconnection

“…Godinho de Matos & Adjerid (2019) studied the effectiveness of a campaign for obtaining GDPR-compliant consent for personal marketing and found such practices effective, though at additional cost to the firm to elicit such consent. Goldberg et al (2019) found a 10% decrease in recorded e-commerce sales for a sample of EU firms after the GDPR's enforcement. found that the week after the GDPR's enforcement, website use of web technology vendor fell by 15%.…”

“…1 The European Union (EU)'s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) serves as a landmark privacy law, regulating the collection, processing, and transfers of consumers' personal data that occur along with these transactions. Since the GDPR's approval in April 2016 and implementation in May 2018, it has inspired a wave of privacy regulation in countries such as Brazil, India, Japan, South Korean and the US (Goldberg et al (2019)). The unprecedented scale and scope of the GDPR makes it the most important privacy policy since the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s and many hypothesize it would fundamentally change the internet's operation and the digital economy.…”

Competition and Privacy in Online Markets: Evidence from the Mobile App Industry

“…They show that an opt-in regulation, where users have a fixed cost of giving their consent, might create a barrier to entry for small and new firms, especially if they cater for the needs of fewer customers. In this respect, an increasing amount of articles look at the impact of the European General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR (Goldberg et al, 2019;Jia et al, 2019). However, these studies have not considered effects on the competitive environment.…”