Comment by ceinewydd
7 months ago
A fair number of sites hosted and operated outside the European Union reacted to GDPR by instituting blocks of EU users, many returning HTTP 451. Regardless of whether you believe GDPR is a good idea or not (that's beyond the scope of this comment), the disparity in statutory and regulatory approaches plus widely varying (often poor) levels of 'plain language' clarity in obligations, and inconsistent enforcement, it all leads to entirely understandable decisions like this and more of a divided internet.
Thank you to those who have tirelessly run these online communities for decades, I'm sorry we can't collectively elect lawmakers who are more educated about the real challenges online, and thoughtful on real ways to solve them.
>A fair number of sites hosted and operated outside the European Union reacted to GDPR by instituting blocks of EU users, many returning HTTP 451.
My outlook on doing this is that this is not the way to do it because these things exist:
- EU citizens living in non-EU countries (isn't GDPR supposed to apply EU citizens worldwide?)
- EU citizens using VPN with exit node to/IP address spoofing a non-EU country
Either comply with GDPR or just don't exist, period.
China or Russia also have "interesting" data protection / "let's protect children" laws. Some of they also formulated in same way as GDPR so VPN doesn't help. Why should they be ignored? (other than "but it's DIFFERENT thing, EU is good ones")