Furthermore, I think this type of legislative arbitrage has already been in play, for the current compliance requirements. It sometimes works the other way around too, and I'd say Spotify was a succesful play that bypassed the negative US climate for media streaming startups, left by Napster.
In my opinion, it has been pretty overwhelmingly a net positive, whereas article 13 is a clusterfuck that made me come up with a Cloudflare rule to block EU visitors from accessing sites (and yes, that includes myself):
https://twitter.com/Stavros/status/1100799044862033922
If anyone from Cloudflare is reading this, can we get a "redirect" firewall rule so I can point the visitors to something like "you can't access that site because the politicians you voted for are morons"?
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3278912
Whats the harm of the GDPR?
EU politicians love rewording things and pretending that they're different.
The Great Firewall exists to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing politically subversive content. The only EU equivalent I can think of is Germany blacklisting certain illegal content providers (i.e. nazis and child porn) that can't easily be shut down.
The reason access to child porn (or marketplaces for illegal substances) is prohibited is that possession and distribution is illegal and therefore even mere use of the services may constitute a crime (even if users don't distribute the illegal goods themselves).
The reason access to nazi sites is disrupted is that these sites are actively inciting racial hatred, holocaust denialism etc. So if you want to make a Great Firewall analogy this is probably the closest equivalent.
The GDPR specifically defines human rights and a mechanism to enforce those for EU residents (i.e. reporting violations to supervising data protection agencies which may use fines when the violator refuses to comply or acts too maliciously). Blocking those sites wouldn't make sense as the users aren't doing anything wrong by accessing those sites (it's the sites that are abusing the users).
The copyright reform also doesn't really target users -- article 13 just eliminates the safe harbor provision that allows file sharing services to distance themselves from the content they host. Access to those sites is not illegal and access to illegally hosted content is treated no differently in the EU than in the US.
In other words, aside from the usual anti-consumerist fearmongering about the GDPR your argument could have been made equally well when the US started shutting down the initial wave of file sharing services (from Napster all the way to MEGA). But instead it turned out to be more profitable to just sue people on a case by case basis.
How is it relevant for the question whether the EU will need / institute filters that the US as a disagreeable copy-right system?
If it wasn't inevitable in the US and if it wasn't inevitable when it was only RIAA/MPAA enforcing copyright, what is different this time?
Article 13 restricts the safe harbor provision to sites using upload filters (or sites that are explicitly exempt). There is no logical progression from that to a Great Firewall that wouldn't also have been present in US enforcement of copyright against Napster, The Pirate Bay, MEGA etc.
The GDPR (even if most neo-libs here think it's evil incarnate) is entirely orthogonal to literal censorship.
As I said, the closest thing would be the blocking (in Germany, not the EU) of nazi propaganda and extremely illegal content (read: child abuse) -- which have nothing to do with the recent EU legislations and are therefore an entirely separate discussion to be had.
Maybe the UK's "opt-out" modesty filter also falls in this category but as Theresa May is still happy to point out, the UK is leaving the EU, so it's hardly a good reference point for the future of EU legislation.
So if none of these things uniquely point to a future of Chinese-style censorship in the EU, what other than American Exceptionalism makes the current situation different from all the other situations in which we did not end up with said Great Firewall of Europe?
Article 13 is bad. Upload filters are bad. But please educate me how making unsubstantiated claims about how the EU is basically already China is supposed to be contributing to a healthy discussion but providing and then dismantling the obvious arguments OP chose to omit is somehow fallacious and irrelevant?
It can end no other way than that. Particularly as these draconian regulations continue to get worse. How else will they enforce these policies against foreign entities that can trivially ignore them while still serving EU users? They have to put a stop to that, as it's an easy circumvention.
I can build a service in the US. Allow EU citizens to sign up. Entirely disregard most, if not all, EU laws. Monetize the huge US market first as a cash springboard. Acquire scale. Then turn on EU monetization when it's convenient to deal with the regulatory challenges there. There might be considerable retroactive fines involved for ignoring EU law over time while still taking on EU users (when you attempt to monetize the EU users, requiring business on the ground in the EU, that's when they'd land punches financially; the retroactive approach would be the solution the politicians would come up with as a desperate stop-gap against this approach); so what, I'm now a monopoly platform, I already won, hit me with your speeding ticket. If you make the speeding ticket too large, I'll demonetize the EU users, remove all business from the EU, ignore any fines, retain the EU users anyway to prevent competition, and keep going (come back later and see if I can lobby/bribe the EU politicians in some kind of fine settlement).
The sole means to stop that scenario - which is almost obnoxiously beneficial to furthering US dominance in platforms - is to lock down all Internet usage in the EU and dictate by permission what sites may be used. The tighter they get with Article 13 style regulations, the more likely they have to implement an EU firewall.