Because if you break a law that applies there you might not be able to travel there or you will be jailed when you do. This applies to other regions/countries too. We can argue practicalities of course, but why risk it based on subjectivity of enforcement?

Also, blocking sends a message to the users in more ways than one.

In 2014 eu news publishers tried to use recent eu copyright laws to get google to pay for snippets used in their news and search products. Google said that publishers can opt in to having their snippets shown for free, and the publishers refused. About two weeks later they voluntarily opted in. [1]

So I'm curious to see what would happen if many tech companies refused service to europe. I believe twitter was seeing around 6,000 tweets per second, a few years back. 6,000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 = ~189.2 billion tweets per year. Say 1 minute to analyze them, you would need 3.15 billion man hours. 8 hours a day * 40 hours a week, * 50 weeks per year = 16,000 hours per employee, per year. So thats 197,100 employees, not counting management. The last time I checked, they had 3,600 employees, and lost about $.5 billion per year. Automated analysis works, but not perfectly. What happens when you AI filter misses something? So refusing service might have to be an option?

[1] "The law went into effect last August and, while some details still need to be ironed out in court, the controversial heart of it — whether search engines will pay money to publishers — has an uncertain future. Google has refused to pay fees to publish snippets from news sites, and instead asked German publishers last year to opt in if they want to be included in Google News search results, waiving their right to cash in on the use of their content according to the new law. To avoid paying the collection agency, VG Media, which represents the publishers that chose not to opt in, Google stopped showing snippets from their news articles on Oct. 23. Shortly after that, the publishers in VG Media gave Google a license to restore snippets to their search results — for free. Berlin-based Axel Springer, one of Europe’s largest publishers, announced on Nov. 5 that it had caved to Google’s pressure after traffic to its websites from Google dropped by 40 percent and from Google News by 80 percent when snippets were left out of search results."

http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/the-fight-to-get-google-to-...