If they are not collecting any personal data, there is no hassle. Do you think it's somehow bad for a car manufacturer to not want to go through the hassle of making their cars conform to the safety standards?
> Among other things this includes setting up an EU represeneitive
Citation needed.
> a high bar for a free product
The product is not really free because users pay for it with their data, which was unclear before.
> Obviously you haven’t had to deal with GDPR compliance.
Obviously from what? Are you a GDPR compliance expert?
Ah yes, the old "all regulations are equal" argument. It should come as no surprise to you that people view safety regulations on automobiles as vastly different than regulations on what a company can do with data about you.
Safety regulations exist because people wanted them, and the same is true here for privacy and data protections. Unless you can convince EU citizens en mass that they don't want the rights and protections afforded to them by this law then it really doesn't matter what anyone in particular person thinks.
You don't need to be a GDPR compliance expert to know that the costs of implementing GDPR are huge and I doubt any GDPR experts actually even exist today.
So you don't actually know anything, but you are going to pretend to know that it's "huge".
> I doubt any GDPR experts actually even exist today
Then why be so condescending and pretend that you are actually one?
Or the original news simply ceases to exist as is already happening at the local level in many cases. There's probably a continuing market for some global news organizations that are at least muddling through with subscriptions and other products. (Or not. See story on Time Inc. recently.) But I suspect the non-national/international journalism will continue to decline.
Good riddance, at least we know what websites we shouldn't have visited in the first place.
> smaller companies take their place with products that either cost money or will be a bit worse.
Or they will be better and still be free.
News companies are dying, news is commodity, if I can't read something on the LA times, I'm sure I'll find that same article on some other news site.
> small competitors will be to afraid of the law and shut EU users out
It's not a complicated piece of legislation, the short version is this simple: only collect data you actually need on your user to offer your service and be prepared to explain why, that's basically it.
> But we as a society are willing to accept that if the result is that more loans will be "reasonable".
The actual reason is that if you don't limit the loans, your economy will collapse.