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.