How not to argue for GDPR simplification - even if you are Mario Draghi

Mario Draghi's speech at the competitiveness conference on 16th September 2025 called for "radical simplification of GDPR", referring to the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU's cornerstone data protection law. He based this on claims that the GDPR "has raised the cost of data by 20% for EU firms compared with US peers". 

But when you look at his footnote, it is a not-peer-reviewed paper by a US research team, which uses data from one (!) cloud provider, and finds that "EU firms decreased data storage by 26% and data processing by 15% relative to comparable US firms". They then propose some made-up economic model on the costs of substituting data, and come to the 20% quoted by Draghi. 

This of course completely misses the whole point of the GDPR, which is about limiting the processing of personal data to those that are really necessary.