The best way to fix that is for other countries to start improving their consumer protection laws so cutting off "problem" countries becomes less and less feasible for unscrupulous businesses. Meanwhile (slightly) more ethical companies can take over the EU market.

Do you have any examples for that phenomenon?

I use a lot of news aggregators, and never once got a link to a 451.

I think part of that is also that it's not foolproof to identify where a user is connecting from. Because I think legally, you can't use "but that user had an US IP address" as an excuse why you broke EU law against an EU citizen connecting from inside the EU.

Why not ?

Because if you're not sure where a user is, you can do the right thing instead of guessing.

EU is massive market. If some unscrupulous businesses don't provide their services here, I'd say good riddance. If there's enough demand, other businesses will take over.

Who has taken over from Threads?

I find it a bit hypocritical to associate the unauthorised tracking of visitors, usually for advertising purposes, with the themes of the Fahrenheit 451 book, which are are censorship, conformity vs individualism, the destructive role of technology, and the loss of critical thinking.

On the contrary, I think it's very true to the spirit of lost critical thinking.

Every single consumer protection has people show up on the side of the giant corporations. Usually a libertarian type with no clue how furious they would be if they got what they were asking for.

Most of us were getting what we asked for before the EU dropped the GDPR on us to claim ownership of the sandbox they didn't build. ;)

Isn't that just what advertising does?

I would love that. Makes more money for us since we can now build competitive service more easily.

We shouldn’t do consumer protections because then businesses who ignore consumer protections might not do business

Isn’t quite the argument you think it is.