> I wonder how long until companies outside of Europe decide it's easier just to block all traffic from Europe in protest.
Exactly this. I already hit error 451 when trying to read some local news in US when browsing from Europe (I don't remember name of the page now). This happened after GPDR came into effect. I can totally relate with companies who don't want to deal with legal mess related with GPDR and other nonsense from EU an prefer to just show the user error 451 page. I'm pretty sure VPN providers and huge companies like Google will benefit from this legislation.