Rosamunde Van Brakel (researcher at Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and managing director of CPDP) made in recent conversation an interesting point about GDPR. She sees it as very much shaped by the Digital Single Market frame. This can be noticed even in the general frame of the regulation, which according to her focuses on protecting consumers. And lacks tools to protect non-consumers, such as children or the elderly.
Unfortunately, Rosamunde could not provide any background reading on this and shared this just as a personal observation. So confirming this would require a more detailed analysis of GDPR. Which could be a potentially interesting research project, to test the hypothesis whether the DSM frame indeed forces key regulations to be market-oriented. We would probably discover that it varies across different regulations. Would we find any that has a strong non-market, civic or commons focus? Would we, paradoxically, discover that provisions that protect European culture through content playing quotas are a rare example of balancing the market and collective rights?