Begun? Surely you remember Youtube region locking videos. Or companies that don't offer their services (or have different) outside of their region opening international sites that have different content in different regions.

This is nothing new.

Even worse, and more surprising and alarming, a few weeks ago the Humble Bundle was selling region-locked EBOOKS! Someone explain that one for me, please. This means I wanted to buy a bundle of sci-fi books -- that's buy, not read for free -- and all of the most interesting books (old classics, by the way) were "not available in your region".

edit: a clarification: the ebooks themselves don't have DRM, but Humble Bundle will refuse to sell them to you if you're in whatever region they (or the publishers) don't want to support at the time.

Say what now?

And did Humble Bundle support fix your issue?

Man, I remember when a major Humble Bundle selling point was being DRM free...

If it's like previous times I've seen this, the ebooks themselves will still be DRM-free, HB just won't sell some of them to you i.e. they won't be included in the bundle you get.

Yes, thanks for clarifying. This is still tremendously disappointing. They show you the books in the bundle, but refuse to sell them to you. I wonder how this is a thing. It certainly lowered my faith in the Humble Bundle.

I'm sure it's a distribution rights issue - probably someone who didn't want to deal with Humble Bundle owns the book rights in those regions. As a non-American I see it all the time with media.

I'm sure it is too, but IMO Humble Bundle should refuse to carry books with those restrictions.

I explained myself badly. It's like commenter mrec said: it's not that the ebook itself has DRM, but that they won't sell it to you, with the message "unavailable in your region". Very disappointing.

So it's not negative that right after we stopped doing it with videos, we are doing it with everything? I'm European. I just want to use the Internet, all of it; please, EU, leave me alone, I can handle my data by myself more than well enough.

Then go ahead and allow the companies to use your data. No one stops you. And leave the rest of us alone.

I'm unable to access this website. I can't let them use my data, GDPR is stopping me because compliance is apparently too expensive for this site. I don't have any option to click on a "I don't want any GDPR-provided 'rights'" button or e.g. sending such header with my requests.

AFAIK, the GDPR explicitly makes it illegal for a company to operate on a “pay with your data” basis. So no, they can’t.

How so? The users just have to give their consent for it.

Because you can't have access to the service conditional on the consent.

So are we going to lose access to Google and most other services? Because they are effectively "pay with your data"

If gdpr had its way, then yes, you would probably lose access to google and pretty much the rest of the web. Right now, most companies are skirting around the law though so we will have to wait and see the real effects once the lawsuits start settling.

Previously you've had to use the likes of tor to reach the dark net, now, I guess, non EU IP is enough. Same divided internet, only the boundary is moved.

Well, we had piracy in the 90s, and if some greedy CEO wants to support a revival of that tradition..