The threat of the gigantic fine is what gets people into compliance to prevent this from happening.
Lots, possibly even the majority of companies in Europe beefed up their IT security procedures because of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if almost everyone that sits at a keyboard in Europe didn't get called into a meeting to talk about how important it is for them to keep their customer's data private and ways to do that.
Without something like this in place, companies can just not even care about users data.. because 'oops, we did nothing to protect it' is still a valid excuse.
On the other hand, they also don't provide internet services to people.
Because while the rulemaker believes that there is a range of potentially reasonable judgments based on particular circumstances, they do not believe that range is unbounded.
> The only reason I can think of is to protect large corporations.
The fixed minimum upper limit of $20 million is actually probably to prevent (or limit the effect of) large corporations using smaller subsidiaries and fancy accounting for GDPR-risky activities, rather than the upper limit protecting large corps.
1. To prevent cruel and unusual punishment.
2. To set expectations about the seriousness of the infraction in the eyes of the law.
I am not a lawyer or a legal scholar, so I'm sure there are more reasons.
When a store says “Everything up to 50% off”, that doesn't mean everything is half price.
I think that is the catch?