Alliance Horlogère was founded in 2005 with the intent of helping to perpetuate the knowledge and skill of watchmakers around the world. The platform served the community well for more than a decade, burgeoning to more than 25,000 pages that in turn helped tens of of thousands of watchmakers every month. Sadly, in 2016, the expense associated with guarding against spam entries and bitcoin related activity on the site hit a tipping point. In order to keep what the community had contributed over the years up online, in 2017, the decision was made to archive a static copy of the site to remain publicly accessible while the infrastructure that had previously been powering the site would be shut down. On May 25, 2018, the European Union set into motion GDPR. Due to the ambiguous nature of the laws laid out under GDPR and the site's reliance on 3rd party analytics that were hard coded into the archived version, Alliance Horlogère could neither afford the legal counsel or administrative capacity necessary to ensure compliance with GDPR.