So we didn't need the EU regulation at all then?

A slightly puzzling Guardian column talking about car insurance. The EU insisted that prices could not vary solely on the basis of gender, ending the manner in which women were generally charged less than men. The result of which has been:

My conclusion is that the EU ruling has done women a favour. Before, insurers bluntly charged you a bit more if you were male, a bit less if you were female. Now they have to price it according to rather more concise data reflecting your individual driving behaviour.

My guess is that women were actually paying too much before the ruling and are now paying premiums that more accurately reflect their risk.

Car insurance may have become less equal. But it is more fair.

The argument here is that the insurers have delved more deeply into the data and now discriminate upon things like miles driven, occupation, size and expense of car and so on. The justification being that the EU rules forced this.

Hmm, yes, we've seen no other sector of the economy start to use Big Data at all have we? No one, not subject to EU regulation, has started to slice and dice their customer base. Nope, nada.

There's a very strong temptation to insist that the change would have happened among profit hungry companies anyway as the technology emerged to enable this. But how to decide? Regulation caused it, regulation is irrelevant to it?

As an aid to decision making, consider roaming. The EU is very proud of the fact that is has reduced the costs of using a mobile phone from one country to make calls inside another. We've even Remoaners insisting that the loss of this will be a significant cost of Brexit. We ourselves would note that such freedom from roaming charges is available on any number of plans out there in the marketplace. Including to and from and within many countries which aren't in the EU and thus not subject to the regulations.

This is more about the EU claiming credit for something that would and did happen without them than anything else. Being able to point to the regulations is that credit claiming.