You can still run a free website and be compliant with the GDPR. The EU/EEA is the largest market in the world, closing yourself for an market that size will hurt more than changing a few thing to be compliant.
Only if I make significant money from that market. If most of my revenue/profit comes from the US and it's problematic to "do business" in the EU or China, why wouldn't I want to just cut access off rather than dealing with potential hassles? The fact that it's potentially a large market is irrelevant to me. In this case, any moderately tech-savvy consumers can get to my site anyway using a VPN. But I've sent a clear message that I'm not marketing to European consumers.
Personally, I do no tracking on my sites so it's irrelevant to me but I understand why news sites with primarily local readership would decide dealing with the EU is more trouble than it's worth.
For a large, well-capitalized company to make this choice, it’s an indication of a few possibilities:
- Tronc doesn’t practice anything close to adequate IT practices to even know its compliance status, and pefers not to invest in doing so.
- Tronc can’t remain profitable if displaying GDPR-compliant pages in EU (this seems fleetingly unlikely, given the specific attempts to grow digital subscribership by marketing the papers as more global).
- Tronc is trying to make a political statement, like a boycott, hoping that many companies do this and it puts pressure on mitigating GDPR.
So while I agree with you for some small businesses just not wanting to mess with GDPR compliance or risks, however small, it certainly isn’t aviable explanation for these newspapers.
Geo-locked products are nothing new. I lived in a communist country, few EU countries and a middle eastern country and I can promise you that when a certain brand is not available a local competitor pops up and after the original brand becomes available it stays remain a curiosity unless it's a massive pop culture icon(McDonald's, CocaCola, Amazon, Netflix etc. - stuff that's on American TV shows all time. The TV Shows are also geo-locked but local pirates make them available few hours after the USA. Even in Cuba).
So, it's not a simple problem of if(profit < feel like worth it) then block EU.
Let me rephrase: when you collect data on people with the goal to do behavioral / preference analysis on it, it doesn't matter any more whether or not you're 'marketing' to them, or even that you 'send them a clear message' you don't 'market to them'. The GDPR still applies to you.
I've said this many times here already, but law is not a closed rule based decision tree. Intent matters, and laws are written in a way that they can be interpreted so that their meaning can be adapted to new circumstances or different times. Now, I'm not going to argue about whether that's how it should be (because that's such a trite 1L discussion), but it's a fact that it is.
So no, that's not how it works.
So the EU regulators can say my TOS have to allow EU citizens to access my site and my site must follow the GDPR.
That seems unlikely, and the fact that there's so much ambiguity around this is why so many websites are opting to block the EU rather than dealing with it.
Hence my comment up thread - the law is not a closed system you can program like a code wars game, where if you're clever enough a judge will say 'oh you outsmarted me here because your logic is internally perfectly consistent, have a good day sir'.
So shouldn't the website's intent to block you from accessing it matter?
https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-23/
Short version: GDPR does not apply if you happen to collect data on a few EU residents by accident (assuming you're not otherwise based in the EU).
If the Chicago Tribune doesn't envisage offering goods or services to EU residents, it's not covered. And geofencing out EU residents is a pretty good indicator it's not. (Frankly, it probably doesn't have to--it's unclear why someone would think the Chicago Tribune was actively marketing to EU residents anyway--but geofencing them out certainly eliminates any ambiguity.)Someone can't find their way to a site, fake being outside the EU, yell gotcha, and expect European regulators to do anything about it whatever people may wish.
By blocking EU ip-ranges, that may change, I admit that. However, if by other measures like finger-printing the browser you serve EU-specific ads to vpn'd users you may be up to problems.
IANAL but it would seem pretty obvious that any content a visitor might seek on a website would fall under the rubric of "services." It seems like a tough position to argue that since e.g. the Chicago Tribune doesn't offer subscriptions denominated in Euros, that it isn't offering services ("news") globally.
The only thing that today makes clear is that this law is a mess, and it will take a lot of litigation before anybody really knows what it means.
So the question is - does the Chicago Tribune 'monitor user behavior'. The recitals say about that
In order to determine whether a processing activity can be considered to monitor the behaviour of data subjects, it should be ascertained whether natural persons are tracked on the internet including potential subsequent use of personal data processing techniques which consist of profiling a natural person, particularly in order to take decisions concerning her or him or for analysing or predicting her or his personal preferences, behaviours and attitudes.
If I look at the list of tracking scripts, it's rather obvious that this is what their 'data processors' are doing. Hence, the territorial scope extends to them.
Shouldnt you be the one sent to jail, as you are illegally accessing a computer that you were sepecially told not to access?
Because you would rather grow your market?
The world doesn't have uniform GDP per capita. Potential European customers have more money to spend than most of those other potential customers. If you're looking for a new market, Europe is a juicy one.
More like, sent a clear message you're not concerned of your user's data.
(Nothing personal, the signal may not necessarily echo the reality)
I'm all for it.
False equivalence. You can do nothing untoward with user data and still not be compliant.
Spin up a DO/Linode/etc. instance and apt-get install apache2? You're now theoretically liable for a 20 million Euro fine.
Do the same, but from any country in the world, and make sure your welcome page has multiple languages, including some EU ones. Now you're specifically targeting EU users and you're liable for up to $20 million euros.
The response from GDPR fans is that: a) regulators would never levy such a fine, or b) they can't enforce it, or even c) that of course you should be fined because you're a filthy scammer who is stealing people's data and violating their human rights!
But all that misses the point: in what universe is it reasonable to even make such a claim to begin with? And why should I have to trust that the regulators will be more reasonable than the law requires, or that they won't be able to enforce what they'd like to do? And why should I have to comply because you sent me your info voluntarily??
Is there something that makes the internet different here? If someone in the EU puts some personal info in an envelope and mails it to me and I never get around to opening it and it just sits on a stack with other junk mail, am I now violating their human rights by keeping the info they voluntarily sent to me?
Everyone I've tried to make this point to has ultimately said something to the effect of "yes, you're violating their rights by not throwing out the letter." It's baffling.
One of the most annoying things about the GDPR fandom is the black and white nature it seems to inevitably take. If your log files store IP addresses, you're clearly evil and shady and are violating human rights, just as bad as if you're recording people's conversations at home with the intent to deprive them of insurance or publish their sexual histories or whatever.
What possible "horrendous" harm is there from apache's default config storing IP addresses? Can you give me an actual harm that has befallen someone as a result of this that isn't some freak one-in-a-billion example?
It means that any future government, no matter how evil it is, could query your log and know precisely what I am doing on the internet right now. I might not want that.
That's optimistic ... but there is no reason to believe in many niche areas that another equally good product will do that. It is very plausible that in fact what will happen is that EU customers will be significantly delayed in accessing valuable services and products. And in many cases the web sites provide those would be making no meaningful intrusion on privacy in the first place.
Define "largest" in this context.
The European Union is 7% of the world's population.
So by "largest" he means "not largest," as in there's still 93% of the world left to do business with.
Please don't believe your own propaganda. EU/EEA revenue is a fraction of US revenue for all large multinationals. Small businesses probably make even less from the EU.