It's not a nightmare, it's a responsibility towards the people who use your product, and the society that allows you to gain wealth from such usage.

If you want to simplify the system, lobby for multiple nations to adopt a good standard, or move on.

So, are you going to report NK users to them if you host dissident contents? You have to comply to your local laws, not foreign laws.

You have a choice of not offering your services in these countries.

This isn't even a law, it's an order.

Don't want to comply? Don't accept users from that country. That's the reality of a multi-national...

After all this hypocrite talk about net neutrality, it's suddenly okay to block users based on their country?

What does net neutrality have to do that? That talk is about the role ISPs play on the Internet, and whether practices like zero-rating and shaping based on source and preferring your own services should be allowed.

Yes, if you want to provide services on the Internet and don't want to comply with the laws of some countries, then you have to make sure you don't provide services to those users.

You see it all the time in copyright related situations, where companies lack the rights to distribute something in certain countries -- so, Spotify doesn't work in every country, for example. Neither does Amazon Prime Video. Netflix has a different selection in each country it operates in, and is also not available in every country.

What's the difference?

It's pretty much like this for every country, Whatsapp can always set app to be not available for some countries if they are not happy with the local laws.

What's the alternative? You comply with the laws in your country of choice?

Comply with the laws where you based at. Other countries can't enforce their laws just because you communicate with their residents.

Well, that's not true - they certainly can, and (as in this case) are going to, the EU GDPR restrictions on personal data privacy (starting from May 2018) will affect many, many non-EU companies, starting from the largest global ones.

Perhaps you meant to say that other countries shouldn't enforce their laws just because you communicate with their residents?

It would be a nightmare to comply with the laws of a country I am visiting