> Eventually all regions that pretend to care about their citizens freedom should adopt a GDPR like law.

But unless they all adopt the same one, the requirements will all be different, which means they'd each have independent compliance costs, which means local news providers like this will still block everybody outside of their own jurisdiction so that they only have to pay one set of compliance costs instead of sixteen or a hundred.

Exactly. Attempting to regulate the internet will always end in failure, as we've seen again and again. The EU's initiatives are very noble but I think: as they try to keep enforcing their laws and fines, they're just going to end up with less content being available to people in their jurisdiction. You thought copyright region-restrictions were bad.. just wait until Spotify refuses to serve your continent because compliance is costing more than the profits you generate.

If spotify stops taking my money I and millions others will go buy music somewhere else. Spotify is not exactly popular with non-superstar musicians either.

Like where? It's not exactly a bustling market -- Google is dead since they killed Play Music and tried to force everyone to YT, Apple Music pretty much only appeals to Apple users, and all the other alternatives have relatively small catalogs.

I'm not trying to be combative, I'm legitimately asking: what alternatives to Spotify are there?

The premise was that Spotify would decide it wasn't worth the bother to service the EU (or another market) due to GDPR (or a similar law). In that event, I have no doubt that an alternative or two would emerge.

There are lots of regulations governing all the stuff you use and consume. They are different between regions but often regions band together and synchronize their regulations.

It's really not a big deal and yes if the tradeoff is that forcing the web monopolies into consumer friendly behaviour means that some tiny services are region limited (in name, not necessarily in practice due to vpns) then it's a net good.

> They are different between regions but often regions band together and synchronize their regulations.

This is, as a general rule, catastrophically worse. Because then the only parties with input into the rules are the largest organizations who can successfully lobby an inter-governmental body and they (unintentionally or on purpose) promote rules that work for the largest organizations and annihilate smaller ones.

It also tends to make the rules much more complicated, because each of the individual jurisdictions have their pet issues they want to graft onto the unified system, so now instead of having some obscure and poorly conceived rule only applying in Russia or Egypt, it ends up on page 641 of the unified rules.

Compare this to some kind of rational system where the rules that apply are those of the jurisdiction where the server is located and then if you don't like the rules in Iran or California, you use the services hosted somewhere else. And the services that really are targeted at your jurisdiction end up locally-hosted anyway for the efficiency advantage unless your jurisdictions rules are so oppressive that they overcome it, in which case "Chinese dissidents use servers in the US or South Korea" is a valuable release valve.

And if you're fine with people using a VPN to use services that don't comply with their own jurisdiction's rules anyway, you should be fine with that. Because the only difference is to deprive the majority of their agency if they can't figure out how to work a VPN.