An Eve Online corporation has been hit with a GDPR request from an ex-member

If someone follows that request and if the EU has jurisdiction are orthogonal issues; plenty of services offered deletion before the GDPR.

The question of jurisdiction will come up if you ignore requests or otherwise violate the GDPR and a national agency that is responsible for handling violations contacts you.

In which case you can still choose to ignore them, if you're not on EU soil, then it's up to the extradition or similar laws on what happens; the agency will likely file a court case (or you file), then the court will handle out the details with your national legal system; in most cases this means nationalizing any punishment. Ie, the court case will be handled and if you don't show up after being invited, will be ruled upon in your absence. Then the fine will be forwarded to your country where the courts in your country with your countries jursdiction will then collect it, probably take a fee and then forward the remainder back to the EU. An alternative outcome would be that the entire court case is moved into your country.

Either way, complying to GDPR-related requests doesn't mean admitting jurisdiction of the EU; disagreeing the responsible government agencies involved is a good way to test if those have jurisdiction.

And yes, there is a need to verify IDs. Most companies don't have online forms for this so the way has always been to send an email and enquire, or to write on paper with a copy of a valid ID.

This is not new.

The question is whether data submitted under a pseudonym (e.g. forum activity) are actually personal information by law since the individual cannot be identified.

The GDPR is exactly the same. EU says that you have to comply with the GDPR if you process EU-citizen data. So company have the same choice: Comply with the EU GDPR or don't do business with the EU. I don't think it happen yet, and I think that the framework for this is not even ready yet, but nothing would prevent EU from banning your service in the EU if you don't want to comply with the EU GDPR.

I honestly don't understand why there is such an outcry about it. It always worked like this: you want to do business with a country, you apply the law of the country. Internet is not a magical international space with no regulation.

You can argue that this kind of laws, that is a form of protectionism in a way, is bad. But it has been this way for a very long time and GDPR is absolutely not the first time such a law was put in place.

Just another example, if you are a US citizen creating a bank account in the EU, the bank (even if it is a EU bank), will have to declare it to US authorities (apparently due to your tax system that also apply if you are resident abroad).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_sanctions_agains...

For isntance: Germany has laws around limiting usage of Nazi symbolism. If you create a web page glorifying Nazis and their symbols this is illegal under German law. If you run such a site targeting Americans no German state attorney or Court will take the case (exceptions exist for stupidity or ego or power play reasons) however if you host a page in the U.S. aiming at German Nazis that way (for example by commenting on German politics and German language) they will try to go after you. (Which might not lead far, as the site is probably protected by US freedom of speech, thus US authorities won't assist, but you might want to avoid travelling to Germany and countries which might cooperate with Germany)

P.S. I don't want to imply that you have any such plans for such a site, but it's a specific example working fully virtual