Well, because for a short while, it was assumed that UK would just follow the same rules as EU does, and thefore UK companies could be given an easy pass operating in the EU, or when interacting with EU citizens. For instance there is/was no need to inspect any items coming from UK into the EU, since the general assumption is that the standards are still the same as they were pre-brexit, so they don't need to be treated like coming from a country like China or India.

However, this is all changing now. UK is keen to get rid of regulations it inherited from the EU, making it a much less attractive place to do business with, from the EU perspective. We can no longer assume that companies hosting EU citizen's data on UK soil will play nice and follow the same rules - it will be treated with caution initially, and (hopefully) with eventual hostility towards it, as UK seems to be going full on surveilence mode with government and its agencies having access to everything at all times with no warrants needed.

So yes, it "doesn't matter" only if UK isn't interested in working with the largest trading block on the planet. If they truly want to go that path, then sure, whatever.

> For instance there is/was no need to inspect any items coming from UK into the EU, since the general assumption is that the standards are still the same as they were pre-brexit, so they don't need to be treated like coming from a country like China or India.

This was never assumed under the current deal; the UK was given a grace period, which has now expired, before full enforcement, but on day one it was clear that inspection and/or barring of some goods (particularly food) would be necessary.

Because of data sharing over international borders.

Can't send EU citizen data to a data centre in London if the EU says the UK's standards aren't high enough.

Because some of the people living in the UK would prefer stronger, EU-like data protection regulation. It's a big deal to relax the regulations in that sense.

And Brexit was specifically about whatever EU does they'll do the opposite, so it's fine. Next is health care, the food safety standards, and the rest.

As Bruce Sterling wrote in 2016: https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/487/Bruce-St...

> Great Britain is becoming Little Britain. The UK is like a giant Cayman Islands in 2016. They used to be the wise and perfidious grownups in the geostrategic room, but now it's all about squalid, petty things like Brexit, Scottish secession, anti-immigration; British political extremes are thriving and the middle is dead as mutton. They've lost their soft-power by the bucketful; people who used to beg for their wise counsel now ignore them. What do they want -- to be Airstrip One for any creep with a trailer-truck full of cash? I've never seen them think so small.

And a while ago the Tory party's Russian donors problem was in the news, including the son of an ex-KGB Gazprom owner who got a peerage. Whose party in Italy Boris Johnson the then foreign minister went to, alone. God damn, what a corrupt bunch.

Every day I get more convinced that most contemporary right wing politics is just collective narcissistic personality disorder.

Because if we don't comply with the GDPR then we can't deal with EU citizens. Which is a massive market right next to us. So now companies have two parallell data protection regulations to deal with, which is extra cost.

At best, extra cost for UK companies with EU customers, at worst, being excluded from certain sectors.