IMO, it's that a) people in EU care more about privacy and b) the political influence of the data processors in question isn't as strong as in the USA.
b) (with swapped roles) is the reason why the diesel emissions cheating and the FIFA bribery cases were investigated in the USA. They were open secrets, but nobody did anything about them in their countries of origin because of regulatory capture.
The other thing is that the EU parliament has some internal political shuffling that most people aren't even aware of. I don't know anybody in real life that can name even one of the parties (or groups) in the EU parliament. It's very difficult to say that they're definitely doing what the people want.
>How do you think that GDPR is the optimal way to achieve... Well, what exactly are you saying is the goal? You are only alluding, thus letting everyone complete your argument with whatever they may find most credible.
Simply make it more difficult for established/outside companies to target the EU market. It's not a conspiracy, so there isn't like a step by step plan that could be taken by the EU to actually do this. Only some people and groups in the EU seem to be really interested in something like this.
Yes, that's the point: at the moment, vacuuming up every bit of data is essentially free, so companies take a maximalist approach to it, and aren't paying nearly their fair share of the resulting externality costs. Personal data storage needs to become costly enough that companies are forced to decide if it's actually worth it.
I would also add that, just like every other time an industry failed completely at self-regulation and just ran wild until public outrage forced the government to step in, this wouldn't be happening if companies had been responsible. But CA and Experia and Unroll.me proved that was never a possibility.