You get to live in a place that has (democratically) decided to put a particular cost on privacy. That cost being that you don't get to benefit from the cheap-ness of low-privacy offered in other places.
And we don't talk about this nearly enough. Everybody loves being able to buy super cheap clothes from sweatshops in Bangladesh. Everybody is still going to enjoy the football world championship in Qatar, played in stadiums built by what's effectively a form of slave labour.
We should definitely enforce our humanitarian values also through our trade and other agreements, otherwise they're meaningless.
Despite some politicians best efforts and desires, there's no practical way to stop someone 'importing' privacy damaging web traffic, so the risk of non-compliance is being loaded onto foreign website operators. Therefore should a US website desire to follow EU laws, there would be no restriction on them being accessible to EU people.
No matter how much privacy laws and regulations occurs within EU, it is unlikely that companies like google, apple, Microsoft or amazon will ever be willing to completely give up on the European market. There is simply too much money to give it up and have competitors take it. The websites that might be willing to exit the market is those that already have very little stakes to remain, like American news sites that focus on specific regions and demographics in the United States. For HN readers we tend to see those for time to time, but I doubt many other Europeans notice much of sites that already exclude European traffic.
changes VPN location to US
"Ah, an American, welcome!"
Everyone should be using a VPN. Of course, "Which VPNs can you trust?" ends up being a valid question and I'm sure that landscape will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future.
Everyone who accepts the rule of US companies.
If you have very specific needs, there might be something better than it. But no one ever got burned by choosing Mullvad.
What you are complaining against is that some sites are built around selling user data and EU makes it hard to do so. The cost you are talking about is your inability to form certain contracts. Every regulation comes at certain cost. However, in this particular case the data protection and safeguards against selling of such data are the basis of regulation, not the consequence. GDPR is born to enforce this cost and this cost has been integral part of surrounding debate.
It is not people who are not willing to talk about this cost, but rather data broker lobbyists, who try to sweep this cost (data protection) under the rug who do not want to talk about this cost. Every time someone makes a counterpoint against broad statements protecting data broker interests (e.g. personalized-ad supported websites cannot exist profitably), that is the debate you are looking for.
This is actually not true.
If I understand your example correctly, you refer purely to the point of view of a citizen, not a company. In that case, I think you are right. It has drawbacks for those citizens that also benefit from it. This was considered when the regulation was created, and some balance resulted.
I think the basic problem is that GDPR is one of those "global" laws - everyone has to follow it, everywhere. This is similar to what the US has (effectively) been doing for a while, perhaps the reason why it became similar. Either way, I consider it as wrong. No law should go beyond a country's border, unless a separate agreement between countries was made. From my point of view, it would suffice to force European companies to not use any services by those who do not comply.
What I am thinking right now: How will this affect me as European wanting to access US sites? There are already a bunch of sites that completely exclude European traffic on IP level.
It's great to have data privacy. I am totally for it. But it comes at a cost. People are not willing to talk about this cost, let alone take it into account when making a decision.