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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

Fuck you too

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Can you blame them? At least they are honest about their adherence instead of something like StackOverflow's "accept everything or die" banner ~~ads~~ pop-ups.

They're *NOT* honest:

> We are engaged on the issue

No you're not, the GDPR has been active for 3 years now, or 5 years if you include the time where it wasn't mandatory, if you were engaged it would have been fixed already.

> and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market.

Yea, so how about the option of just disabling privacy invading code on your website, which would probably take much less than 3 years?

> We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

More repetition of the same empty "we're DOING SO MUCH!".

But well, at least it doesn't say "We care about our European readers" like most of such blocked websites say.

That one usually makes my blood boil: You're not caring at all. If you were caring, you wouldn't lock out 448 million people for years!

But what is their incentive to do that work? They probably don’t make any money from European users, or at least not enough to make the effort worthwhile... so why should they do it?

- It is called the "WORLD WIDE web", not the "local web". If you go to a place you ought to respect its fundamental purpose, no matter if it is a physical place or a virtual one.

- We live in a highly globally interconnected society. Actions everywhere on the planet have consequences everywhere on the planet. If the US fabric of society blows up after their previous clinically insane president incited violence for years, that WILL have consequences for Europe. If only for the thousands of nukes they have and the trillions they spend on military and invading unstable regions.

Also remember that we're being asked to spend tons of money on the NATO to aid in defending US interest.

It is thus of very HIGH interest for me as a European to know WTF is going on in the US because it may end up killing us all, and even if not we still pay for their shenanigans.

So denying us knowledge of affairs we're *very* involved in is rude.

- My country's military has been in Afghanistan for 20 years because of the US invasion. Nobody knows for how long we will be target of terrorist attacks for that. And as a thank you for all of this, I can't even read your local news sites. I wonder how much the US would be enraged if that situation were reversed?

> It is called the "WORLD WIDE web", not the "local web".

So who gave the EU the right to be making rules for the entire “WORLD WIDE” web?

If the EU has the right to be making laws for their jurisdiction, then websites in other jurisdictions also have the right to ignore the EU laws and exclude EU members.

Why would they have to obey the laws if they're not part of the EU?

They could just leave their website online as is, no need to block it if the laws don't apply to them anyway.

GDPR applies if you collect data from an EU citizen[0]. However, I'm not clear how they would enforce/collect it -- perhaps by treaty? Or if you show up in the country after the fine has been applied and left unpaid.

So blocking EU consumers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, as per the worldview of the EU. You're either in it, or you're not.

[0]https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/

Just don't lie to us. The text as is just says "fuck you" in fancy language. It's insulting.

Of course I can blame them. More for being full of shit than anything else.

Please consider that on HN you not only get to vent, but other people have to read it. Scrolling onto your comment felt like coming across a dog poo on a walk in the park. Nothing good about it. I looked at a few pages of your comment history, and too many of them are like that. I'm sorry you have so much anger... Thanks.

Site's covered in globs of advertisements and video anyway. You'd click off even if you could see it, don't worry.

Let’s be realistic here, EU users aren’t a core use case for a local newspaper in Florida. GDPR classification is not high up on the priority list for a local newspaper, so a risk averse lawyer says to just block the whole continent. It’s the worst of US and EU culture combined to achieve the worst possible outcome.

I never said I didn't understand their motivations. But that doesn't mean their conclusion (and formulation) doesn't come down to a "fuck you" in the end.

Plain and simple. Yes they do say '..... you'. I translate that as:

we don't care about you. You don't bring any revenue. None of our advertisers care to advertise to an EU audience.

Example: And why would a restaurant in Florida care to advertise to someone in Paris? What are the chances that someone in Paris will think "oh I need to eat that burger in XYZ Florida resto?"

(ok my example for Paris-burger-Florida is semi-sarcastic - but true. what are the odds? - what is the cost vs potential benefit?)

The GDPR is an FU from EU bureaucrats to the world, not the other way around.

I don't disagree to the conclusion but the Sun-Sentinel is owned by the Tribune Publishing Company, which is the third largest newspaper publisher in the US. Often the subsidiaries use the same core CMS / tech. Compare the Sun-Sentinel to another paper owned by Tribune: https://www.pilotonline.com/

It seems a bit odd to not believe there is not only a way to handle this more gracefully but also that Tribune could handle this globally for all of their newspapers.

At the very least, they could license and proxy content to a European third party who is willing to take responsibility for GDPR compliance; they could easily find takers.

They could, but why? To make an additional $0.0000003 a month?

At any given time, there are hundreds of stories in the Tribune network that have gone viral on Reddit/Facebook and are generating millions of EU page views. They don’t just operate one local newspaper in Florida, and many local stories have broad appeal. As the parent comment mentioned, they very clearly run all of this content on the same CMS and wouldn’t need to integrate each paper’s website individually.

Solution - 1. FoxyProxy (firefox add-on). 2. Google for US free proxy (took about 5 minutes to find one). 3. Profit. As the others who responded to you have already pointed out, was probably not as interesting to you as the headline suggests.

It's not unreasonable to want top avoid the regulatory compliance headache that is GDPR, especially for people who aren't likely to be regular users of the site.

It's a website about Florida. They are doing you a favor.

Single valid counter point here. :)

> Fuck you too

Maybe I'm wrong in this assumption, but to me the section you quoted sounds like they're saying "we're not GDPR compliant, so we can't participate in that market right now"; it's not a "fuck you, Europe" kind of thing. But hey, you know what they say about assumptions.

OPs quote was full of the usual contentless corp-speak. "We are engaged on the issue...", "committed to looking at options..." and "We continue to identify..." These phrases are a nice, pleasant and important-sounding way of saying "We aren't actually doing anything at all, despite GDPR having been adopted over five years ago."

Ok? It's a local newspaper from Florida, why should they be expected to do extra work to support Europeans? You're not entitled to access their site. These local papers are struggling to keep the lights on to serve their communities. YOUR government decided to make GDPR this stringent, and the European Parliament ignored warnings about exactly this happening. You can get your reporting second hand from a European source that follows your laws, at cost to you, or be left out of the loop because your continent expects the rest of the world to follow their laws.

The choice was made in Europe. You reap what you sow.

It's a local newspaper, but owned by the third largest newspaper publisher in the US and uses a shared CMS.

I would be fine with a bit more sincerity, something like: "we don't care about privacy, so go somewhere else". Or if you want to translate it you can put a message like "the EU market is too small for us to even consider implementing non tracking ads, we are sorry we can't sell your data anymore!"

> committed to looking at options

The option they are looking for is the full repeal of the GDPR. Otherwise they aren't going to bother to do anything.

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