This could definitely happen, but would not make sense for the Chicago Tribune and LA Times, which are big corporate entities united as subsidiaries of Tronc, Inc., and could even pool resources to have one compliance office among them from the parent company.

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.