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Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand I think this is a great sign that the GDPR is being taken seriously. On the other, I see this as corporate speak for "We're not sure if ensuring compliance makes business sense for us and this notice may actually be permanent. You're from a region where anyone interested in our content is probably a long-tail outlier that won't make us much money, so ensuring access for you is not a priority."

I really hope that data privacy regulations don't have the unintended side-effect of significantly increasing the geographic balkanization of the web.

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> I really hope that data privacy regulations don't have the unintended side-effect of significantly increasing the geographic balkanization of the web.

It will without a doubt have that effect.

EU citizens are now a liability and simply not worth it. If you are in the EU except yourself to be blocked from large portions of the internet.

On the plus side for the EU, maybe now they'll actually get some internet startups catering to them, since non-EU options are no longer available.

I don't blame them. I'm thinking about doing the same thing for a few of my web sites that have very local content.

The company that sells the advertising on those sites says non-US traffic dilutes the value of the ads, and I'd get 3-5% higher CPM if I filtered non-US traffic.

I've kept them open until now because I like to check on the sites when I travel, but GDPR might be the incentive I need to pull the plug.

> I'd get 3-5% higher CPM if I filtered non-US traffic.

3-5% higher CPM on how many fewer pageviews? In general, filtering out traffic should always make you less money, even as filtering to the most profitable traffic increases how much you make per page view.

If non-US traffic really were losing you money your advertising company could always drop ad requests from non-US traffic.

Non-US traffic is essentially non-revenue for many American web sites (unless you're running AdSense). Serving pages still costs money, though. So it makes more sense to block non-US traffic than to serve it ad-free.

Yep, just had that call yesterday: <0.1% of customers? Drop EU users off our email list and blacklist the EU until we want to actually target the market. Ended up not worth it to even check if we're compliant than to just lose the business, at least for the short term.

It will. Copyright protections do the same - I wanted to see an US-based SNL skit and it's blocked in my country.

BBC stuff is likewise blocked.

I find region-based blocks all the time :( , mostly related to IP and copyright.

> We're not sure if ensuring compliance makes business sense

If that is the the case then it is working as intended. Instead of just ignoring regulation and writing off a small risk of some fixed and difficult to enforce fine as cost of business the "4% of global revenue" clause puts the fear of god into companies.

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