The coming Brexit row over data

THE ARMS of the European Union can sometimes stretch half-way around the world. That, at least, was New Zealand’s experience. In 2017 John Edwards, the country’s privacy regulator, urged its government to overhaul a dated privacy law. There were several good reasons, but one of the strongest originated 11,000 miles from Wellington. The European Union’s sweeping new data law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), was coming into force. Without reform, Mr Edwards warned, the EU could strip New Zealand of its “adequacy” status, which allows businesses to zip data freely back and forth between the trade bloc and other countries. That would have cost New Zealand an important competitive edge. The law was duly upgraded. Without a whisper of a threat of sanctions, the gravitational pull of EU regulation had reshaped the laws of a distant sovereign state.