Comment by bradleyjg
5 years ago
It is magical thinking to believe that a law can impose a cost on businesses and it will come straight out of the pockets of the owners of that business.
There’s an entire sub-field of economics devoted to studying where the incidence of taxes and regulations fall, but voters don’t care to read the literature. If it sounds like we are sticking it to the people that their oversimplified model of the world has decided are bad guys, they are all for it.
That may well be "magical thinking"; but nobody said that costs imposed on businesses don't deplete consumers' wallets, eventually.
There's a libertarian, anti-regulation line of thought to which some USAians seem to be particularly prone.
Europe, and especially the EU, runs on regulations. Without all kinds of regulations, the EU would fall apart. Most people here understand that. They also understand that imposing costs on businesses results in marginally more expensive products (although GDPR compliance isn't expensive, especially if your gesture towards the GDPR is just a cookie wall).
Europeans would rather have the GDPR than be able to read American news sites. American news sites would rather block European readers than comply with the GDPR.
Everything is working as intended, no?
No.
The GDPR requires sites not to discriminate. It is a violation to refuse to serve users because they are in Europe.
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