Instead of turning off the whole site for EU users, why not just turn off the tracking for them?

Turning off a site for EU is pretty easy: setup a geo IP lookup and return a sad page; minimal testing and you're unlikely to break it.

Turning off trackers is harder, you do the same geo IP, but then you have to find all the places you put trackers, and disable them, and test the site without them, and somehow make sure when the next tracker is inserted, it doesn't go to EU. If your code is well managed, it might be easy, but if you're a newspaper, who knows. They may have several different generations of template systems, with older articles staying on what they were published with, or older articles may be static html with embedded trackers.

They have no obligation to bend over backwards for a market they’re not interested in.

Obviously, because then US users would be treated 'unfairly' and could end up using the EU as a way to get around that tracking, too ..

What will your company do for California users, and other states as they adopt similar privacy laws following the success of the GDPR?

Honestly, also do the same until the revenue you and your friends generate outweighs the cost of implementing these things. Currently, it doesn't, and it's up to the beancounters to decide when it's worthwhile.

Personally I don't have a stake either way in the matter. I can see the argument from both sides. But the entire point of a business is to generate revenue, and we can't do that if we start trying to comply with every local chirp and by-law places decide to pass.

They might actually do the same. It depends on what they lose by losing that market...in California’s case, it is far enough away that advertisers for the Chicago Tribune are probably not interested in those views anyways.

Supporting the GDPR isn’t free, those technical and legal costs have to be justified by saving an appropriate amount of lost revenues.

"Supporting" the GDPR is basically following best practices for data security in any case, so if you aren't already doing it, then you or your users will likely get a nasty surprise in short order anyway.

That isn’t true though. If you are claiming that you don’t need a lawyer to go over the rules and you don’t need engineers to re-architect the system to be compliant, then you don’t have anything to lose in a lawsuit when you inevitably mess all of that up.

All laws are nuanced, just thinking that you are already doing the right thing isn’t enough to avoid legal liability.