A bunch of people are about to lose their seats in the upcoming European Parliament elections in May.
I was right.
Although I remember plenty of comments on HN about how Facebook et al. would be blocking EU users because it would be too expensive for them to comply with GDPR.
One or two US based newspaper websites were all I noticed blocking access because of compliance reasons. I expect a similar impact due to Article 13.
Still others present a "subscription required" page if you connect from Europe, but display the content if you access them from the US (or through archive.is).
Sadly neither will happen. The major social media sites and apps were too silent this time around. Back in 2012 when ACTA was voted on there was much more activity.
Since Youtube and Facebook etc. already have filter mechanisms in place they probably want to profit from it by selling it as a SAAS to smaller companies that don't have the resources to implement their own filtering.
Parties and people who run for the European Parliament don't really have concrete policies or manifestos. In particular they can't run on a platform of repealing bad laws, because unlike in a real Parliament, they aren't allowed to do that. All they could do is politely ask the Commission to let them repeal the law, they'd be told no, that'd be the end of it.
So in practice EP politics are wafer thin and the only major differences between parties and politicians are to extent to which they are pro or anti EU. That's why the "Parliament" is stuffed with protest candidates from parties like UKIP. They can't actually do anything, they just make speeches and flame the rest of the MPs, but those MPs can't do anything either except egg on the Commission. So people tune out and don't care about European elections anymore.
There is some fear amongst the establishment now that the next EP elections will be different and people will send anti-EU candidates on a much larger scale than before. But not much fear, because the only thing these candidates can do is slow things down, and realistically even that won't happen because the EU frequently re-interprets its existing laws and treaties to give the Commission new powers on the fly. They'll just do more of that.