But the axiom is misguided.

Legislation on the safety of cars for instance is not free, but necessary.

You could argue that the makers of go-karts are being priced out of the market: after all, the free market should make people put a price on their own safety.

But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that.

> But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that.

Furthermore, here in Europe everyone pays for health care for everyone to some degree so allowing people to do outrageously stupid stuff ends up increasing the tax for everyone.

Lawmakers and voters would prefer not to have regulations; they would prefer if businesses just did the right thing. But they don't, so they have to be regulated. And nobody wants the cost of that regulation to fall on voters; so it falls on businesses.

Hey, who makes money out of these websites? Voters? Nope. Why should anyone but businesses pay the costs of regulating businesses?

There’s an entire sub-field of economics devoted to studying where the incidence of taxes and regulations fall, but voters don’t care to read the literature. If it sounds like we are sticking it to the people that their oversimplified model of the world has decided are bad guys, they are all for it.

There's a libertarian, anti-regulation line of thought to which some USAians seem to be particularly prone.

Europe, and especially the EU, runs on regulations. Without all kinds of regulations, the EU would fall apart. Most people here understand that. They also understand that imposing costs on businesses results in marginally more expensive products (although GDPR compliance isn't expensive, especially if your gesture towards the GDPR is just a cookie wall).

Everything is working as intended, no?

The GDPR requires sites not to discriminate. It is a violation to refuse to serve users because they are in Europe.

Stop saying banned customers are great.

This is my argument.

  %s/are important to us/cannot view this content/g

* "local American media" WTF. Almost all of you are large corporates.

You've got GDPR super wrong. If you think GDPR was only about cookies, you've got it wrong (but that's where Google et al. focuses your attention to be honest- disinformation about GDPR and focusing on cookies even when cookies is NOT what GDPR is about).

The subject is silly banners. Those are nearly always about cookies, or "We won't serve you because you're in Europe, and GDPR" (and the latter violates the GDPR).

My view is that these banners are partly because some businesses think that by annoying users enough, they can get European users to reverse the GDPR. Ain't gonna happen.