What makes you think this would be even remotely reasonable to conclude?
The Great Firewall exists to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing politically subversive content. The only EU equivalent I can think of is Germany blacklisting certain illegal content providers (i.e. nazis and child porn) that can't easily be shut down.
The reason access to child porn (or marketplaces for illegal substances) is prohibited is that possession and distribution is illegal and therefore even mere use of the services may constitute a crime (even if users don't distribute the illegal goods themselves).
The reason access to nazi sites is disrupted is that these sites are actively inciting racial hatred, holocaust denialism etc. So if you want to make a Great Firewall analogy this is probably the closest equivalent.
The GDPR specifically defines human rights and a mechanism to enforce those for EU residents (i.e. reporting violations to supervising data protection agencies which may use fines when the violator refuses to comply or acts too maliciously). Blocking those sites wouldn't make sense as the users aren't doing anything wrong by accessing those sites (it's the sites that are abusing the users).
The copyright reform also doesn't really target users -- article 13 just eliminates the safe harbor provision that allows file sharing services to distance themselves from the content they host. Access to those sites is not illegal and access to illegally hosted content is treated no differently in the EU than in the US.
In other words, aside from the usual anti-consumerist fearmongering about the GDPR your argument could have been made equally well when the US started shutting down the initial wave of file sharing services (from Napster all the way to MEGA). But instead it turned out to be more profitable to just sue people on a case by case basis.
The sheer irony of hearing people get their tinfoil hats in a bunch over the inevitability of an EU firewall because of a copyright reform that neatly dovetails the copyright overreach the US has tried to push in Europe for decades just because this time it's European newspaper publishers instead of RIAA and MPAA is physically painful to me at this point.
Citing irrelevant logical fallacies is not an argument. Also way to "move the goalposts" (see? I can do it too). It's relevant to the alleged inevitability of a Chinese-style firewall in the EU.
If it wasn't inevitable in the US and if it wasn't inevitable when it was only RIAA/MPAA enforcing copyright, what is different this time?
Article 13 restricts the safe harbor provision to sites using upload filters (or sites that are explicitly exempt). There is no logical progression from that to a Great Firewall that wouldn't also have been present in US enforcement of copyright against Napster, The Pirate Bay, MEGA etc.
The GDPR (even if most neo-libs here think it's evil incarnate) is entirely orthogonal to literal censorship.
As I said, the closest thing would be the blocking (in Germany, not the EU) of nazi propaganda and extremely illegal content (read: child abuse) -- which have nothing to do with the recent EU legislations and are therefore an entirely separate discussion to be had.
Maybe the UK's "opt-out" modesty filter also falls in this category but as Theresa May is still happy to point out, the UK is leaving the EU, so it's hardly a good reference point for the future of EU legislation.
So if none of these things uniquely point to a future of Chinese-style censorship in the EU, what other than American Exceptionalism makes the current situation different from all the other situations in which we did not end up with said Great Firewall of Europe?
Article 13 is bad. Upload filters are bad. But please educate me how making unsubstantiated claims about how the EU is basically already China is supposed to be contributing to a healthy discussion but providing and then dismantling the obvious arguments OP chose to omit is somehow fallacious and irrelevant?
The Great Firewall exists to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing politically subversive content. The only EU equivalent I can think of is Germany blacklisting certain illegal content providers (i.e. nazis and child porn) that can't easily be shut down.
The reason access to child porn (or marketplaces for illegal substances) is prohibited is that possession and distribution is illegal and therefore even mere use of the services may constitute a crime (even if users don't distribute the illegal goods themselves).
The reason access to nazi sites is disrupted is that these sites are actively inciting racial hatred, holocaust denialism etc. So if you want to make a Great Firewall analogy this is probably the closest equivalent.
The GDPR specifically defines human rights and a mechanism to enforce those for EU residents (i.e. reporting violations to supervising data protection agencies which may use fines when the violator refuses to comply or acts too maliciously). Blocking those sites wouldn't make sense as the users aren't doing anything wrong by accessing those sites (it's the sites that are abusing the users).
The copyright reform also doesn't really target users -- article 13 just eliminates the safe harbor provision that allows file sharing services to distance themselves from the content they host. Access to those sites is not illegal and access to illegally hosted content is treated no differently in the EU than in the US.
In other words, aside from the usual anti-consumerist fearmongering about the GDPR your argument could have been made equally well when the US started shutting down the initial wave of file sharing services (from Napster all the way to MEGA). But instead it turned out to be more profitable to just sue people on a case by case basis.