Comment by jokethrowaway

I'm European and I block EU customers as well (mainly for VATMOSS though, more than GDPR, albeit I'm not sure whether I'm GDPR ready or not).

Simply put, it's a very low margin and low time investment business on my side and I'd rather work on something that can make me more money than to implement the required changes to support Europe's regulatory plat du jour.

Having worked in big businesses, even if they have the money to spend, they may face other organisational issues. Implementing any change in big businesses is not easy and takes significant more time than you would imagine.

As you correctly say, I'm sure they evaluated the cost benefit of EU visitors and concluded it wasn't as high as the cost of getting things done.

For news, that means that people will be able to access less independent content, or maybe just access what is visible behind the walled gardens of social media. For ecommerce (and VATMOSS), stores just moved to Amazon / eBay so they don't have to deal with the complexity.

As usual, regulators screwed all us up pretending to target big business (whether it's privacy or paying sales tax) and dealt a massive blow to all the small competitors of big business.