To extend @bradleyjg's point, businesses often do try and "do the right thing" but don't always get the "voters" support. For instance, you could have no ads or tracking on your site, and just charge people to view the content. And of course the vast majority of people will simply not view it, go find a "free" version that has ads instead. Most companies could go 100% green today and do so by charging 2-10x more for their products -- do you think people in general would pay for it? It works on some scale, but not in general. So its not as simple as the business doing the right thing and business owners paying the costs. Its about forcing all business to adhere to some regulation, and pass the same cost on to customers in the same way, to achieve some hopefully laudable goal. And that's totally fine in my opinion, but it breaks down when people assume there are no costs passed on to customers, and (again to @bradleyjg's ponit) that you can merely make owners pay it without any knock on effect. Recognizing the costs and how policy works helps voters to push for the right ones IMHO.

It is magical thinking to believe that a law can impose a cost on businesses and it will come straight out of the pockets of the owners of that business.

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.

That may well be "magical thinking"; but nobody said that costs imposed on businesses don't deplete consumers' wallets, eventually.

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).

Europeans would rather have the GDPR than be able to read American news sites. American news sites would rather block European readers than comply with the GDPR.

Everything is working as intended, no?

No.

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

Laws in Europe apply to European subjects only, not the entire world. Europe has no authority to force a non-European company to serve it's subjects.

It certainly has authority to block it from doing business in the EU if they don't comply, and to back that block with legal action against employees or assets inside the region if the company keeps breaking the law.

King Canute required the waves to stop. How did that work out for him?

To be fair on old Knut, his piece of seaside theatre was meant as a put-down for his flattering courtiers, who had told him he was so great he could stop the tide. He wanted to prove the opposite.