> Other internal market measures, including administrative tools to facilitate compliance with cross-border VAT in e-commerce, which will enter into force from July 2021, and the harmonisation of consumer protection rules, which will enter into force in 2022, still need to materialise entirely before the full effects of the Geo-blocking Regulation can be observed.

It is awesome how much is Europe moving towards a more unite block. On one side it is sad to see the lack of promotion that this initiatives get, but I have to admit that the absence of drama is welcome in such a polarized environment in so many countries around the world.

In the full report (linked in the website) they mention this low awareness explicitly: 50% of the consumers are aware of the regulation, and half of them are sufficiently informed about what it involves. On the bright side, they also mention a “need for continued awareness-raising activities among traders and consumers about their obligations and rights“ as a direct action point for the Commission itself.

On a side note, I feel a similar relief as you. As much as I’d personally want a stricter and more enforced regulation, because it bugs me that I can’t access all the content I’d want, I admire that the Commission looks at a bigger picture and takes into considerations long-term effects on the media industry as well as the quality of the available content.

This is good, but I wonder how effective it would be when you consider how badly the GDPR is being enforced.

I bet they do, when they realised just how many companies decided it wasn't worth complying with EU data laws and just block EU IPs instead.

This is nothing to do with that.

It is about a company in one (or more) EU countries blocking access to people in one (or more) other EU countries.

"Sorry, this item can't be delivered to Denmark" seen on Amazon.de is presumably one example, another is downloaded media.

Another example is putting country specific assumptions into your address fields, eg. Requiring a province in a from using a select, and offering only Canadian provinces.

Even if they support everything else, that quirk prevents you from shopping there without a Canadian billing address.

I ran into this yesterday.

If anything was realised, it was probably that companies who decided it wasn’t worth complying weren’t really missed. The only encounters I’ve had with this myself are dodgy American news sites, and the “you’re blocked” page is essentially just a message that says “we can’t really be bothered following pretty basic practices” so… no real loss!

For this reason alone I despise the EU and the whole GDPR garbage. Apart from annoying you with cookie banners on virtually every website, so that you have to install a browser extension just to get rid of them, it has effectively caused significant parts of the internet to become inaccessible for EU citizens.

I don't blame GDPR for those pop-ups. I blame sleezy business models. Those businesses don't need to make those pop-ups so annoying, they are doing it on purpose. After awhile you'll recognize them and automatically open them in private/incognito mode

The only parts of the internet I haven't been able to access from the EU are US local and regional news sites who throw a 451 error because they are managed by immature people. If it bums you out that much, just check the page via archive.org. You'll see you're not missing much