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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

This has been happening for years but if you're in the US you don't realize. For example I can't access my local Montana newspaper web site from the UK "because GDPR" (even though the UK isn't in the EU).

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There is a UK GDPR, it’s the same framework but adopted under UK law:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-the...

There are several US news websites that are completely blocked in the EU and UK since GDPR came into effect, because it was easier than caring about data collection. Probably many of them adapted since then, because everyone realized GDPR has no teeth and most websites that are not global platforms are not compliant.

The ironic thing is that in the UK/imgur case:

>The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.

Wonder if it could also apply to American news sites (and Japan's 5ch/2channel, I was told they engage in this as well).

No, they claim they can't "avoid accountability" by withdrawing services in the UK. What Imgur cares about is where its staff live and work and pay taxes, which is America. The odds that America will cooperate in going after Imgur if they just block the UK go from slim to none.

More importantly, the US might let the UK go after US companies for the business they do in the UK but they sure as hell won't let the UK go after US companies that explicitly don't do business in the UK.

I don't remember the exact details now but that was mostly out of spite from presumably one entity (or a handful at most) that owns many US local newspapers though. They're not subject to GDPR anyway as they explicitly don't target EU users as customers, they just wanted to put pressure, pass a message to the EU.

And as you can see they didn't even bother updating their block after Brexit.

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