Of course there is a cost to market regulations. If you require proper waste management, some industries will have to pay an additional cost compared to just dumping the waste. Few companies in the world have ever said "we will continue to hurt the environment despite the costs". The political gamble with regulations is that there exist competition and through that there will be companies willing to follow the regulation in order to access the market and earn profits.

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.