The government responded putting laws to make sure bread's always available to prevent a revolution.
I wonder what EU citizens would do if new sites blocked EU by default. It's a pity that France (a key instigator of this saga) wouldn't be affected much unlike English speaking countries.
What kind of site would block EU by default?
If EU is a big part of the site's audience, they probably wouldn't close it, and if it's not, well, there wouldn't be enough people complaining.
If a site decides to do this, it's most likely one I don't want to read. I would still be upset.
Edit: corrected URL
It’s also just one example (search for “shutdown because of GDPR” and there are many more tales) and doesn’t account for future companies that now have to factor GDPR into their business plan and may not (likely won’t?) bring their services to Europe.
Take Facebook, for example: at least for my generation, when you don't have an account, you can sometimes feel like you are a burden for others, who organize everything within it (I don't have one and am doing fine, though).
Or take GMail: the only ways to avoid your private email being automatically processed by Google is either to avoid every person using GMail (well...), or to teach those person to use end-to-end encryption. Not that easy.
At best, if an executive of the company ends up personally arrested in the EU, it allows them to make a legal argument to an EU court that they're not intending to do business with the EU. But if that's what GDPR enforcement really ends up becoming, I somehow don't see an EU court being sympathetic to that ploy!
And if the longer term plan is really to simply charge EU users in lieu of surveilling them, then there's even a payment stream to go after if they aren't responsive!
In practice I don't know anyone who has come across those blocks other than in response to [some site has blocked the EU] headlines.
I've probably clicked links to the LA Times half a dozen times since they started blocking the EU.