Some will choose to adjust practices, others might choose to block the EU. If they're happy to lose that many users, as they think tracking is more important, would that be so terrible?

It might even encourage some more ethical alternatives, or some real attempts to solve micropayments.

It really depends on how heavy handed they get in their enforcement actions.

Everyone knows that FB and Google are expending serious resources to be in compliance yet they will more likely than not get some large fines anyway because politics. I doubt they will ever leave the EU but other, smaller, companies will not have the resources to throw at the problem so will be effectively locked out of the EU market.

It's probably in Google's best interest to pay a couple billion euro fine (to scare off the smaller fish) in order to lock in their de facto advertising monopoly.

I already encounter EU blocked sites almost daily. It would get much worse.

And yes, I do consider it terrible that my nanny state government decided what is best for me, over some hysterical fears about tracking. I don’t give a damn. I don’t consider tracking of me in the way the browser can do actual personal information.

I’m OK with a strict regime for actual personal information, like name+address, heck, even spam data like phone and email, but extending that to tracking cookies, at the enormous cost in usability we’re already seeing, is ridiculous.

I hope they do pull out of the EU. That would be one of the biggest business opportunities in history for privacy-respecting companies to fill the void that was left.

You’re be the first in line (if you even are in the EU) to bitch about loosing all that free content you can access now.

That is a desirable outcome too, because copycats will then start in EU, and citizens of all countries will prefer to use their tracking-free services instead of the tracking ones.