It does solve the problem with some businesses not offering exports in machine-readable formats in order to stop users from being able to move to other services together with their data. Or which problems do you think they are aiming to solve here?

> the people already have the power to only use services that allow data exporting.

Yes, but the directives are not meant to help people to chose services, it's meant to help people already using a service and being able to move to a different one with their data. By forcing companies to follow these directives, users no longer have to chose an inferior product just because they offer exports, because all the products have to offer export.

> You're attempting to force companies to behave in a pro-social manner but if that company never wanted to behave in a pro-social manner we'll have just given them another attack surface with their lobbyists to use to kill their competitors.

I don't really understand this line of reasoning, but I'm interested in understanding it. We already have bunch of laws and directives to make companies behave more ethical, since they made it clear that they need laws sometimes to do the right thing. How is this adding another attack vectors to kill their competitors? If company A is "anti-social" (I guess), doesn't offer an export and want to kill their competitor B (who does offer export), how does the export tie into company A being able to kill company B? As I understand it, company B is following the directives while company A isn't, so users of company A could sue that company, but that doesn't affect lawful company B.

But I might misunderstand something so please, elaborate :)

The problem with this is that people are choosing products and services based on many different aspects simultaneously. In particular, price and (with Internet services) network effects are such a strong factors that they pretty much override all other considerations. How this plays out in practice is, the whole market stops offering value along the "irrelevant" factors.

In case of GDPR - because abusing users' data makes money, and not abusing it costs money, everyone starts abusing it to reduce price (or their costs). You're not going to ditch Facebook if all your friends are there. You're not going to ditch your primary care provider because it plays fast and loose with your data - it's a big hassle, and there's no guarantee other providers aren't even worse.

Imagine switching this discussion to one about food safety regulation. If they were suddenly all repealed, you can bet your top dollar that the quality of food would quickly degrade across the board. Even the most upstanding companies would start making sacrifices to keep up with their less ethical competitors, or risk getting outcompeted - relaxing standards allows to drop the price (or increase and reinvest profits), which allows to keep this up through economies of scale, while companies standing their ground on quality lose customers, lose efficiency, and have to increase the price. Customers won't choose the more increasingly more expensive, quality food, because in a typical countries, most people can't afford expensive food.

The end result is the market locking into a new, much lower, food safety level.

There are certain patterns on the market that are very predictable, and which are impossible to fix from within. That's where regulations are needed. And they do seem onerous to businesses when introduced - that's because we usually realize the problem only when we're deep in it.