It's a wordpress installation containing news for Virginia in the US. No one outside this area is the target market.

Which means they can safely ignore GDPR. But they're not, they're blocking visitors. That's an incoherent response: if they need to pay attention to GDPR blocking doesn't protect them, and if they don't need to pay attention to GDPR blocking visitors just deprives them of page views.

> Which means they can safely ignore GDPR.

Strictly speaking, this depends on if and how they track visitors.

In practice, though, they can ignore the GDPR because they won't get into any trouble.

> if they need to pay attention to GDPR blocking doesn't protect them

Could you explain why? I thought that GDPR was applicable only to residents of the EU, and blocking them was a “good enough” way used by websites who do intensive personalized data tracking to avoid having to follow it.

I don't personally approve of this way, but fail to understand why it's supposedly ineffective.

No attorney on retainer?

The site is run by nonprofit online news organization covering state government and policy in Virginia.

Funny. Works fine in Norway, where GDPR also applies due to EEA. I guess their lawyers don't know that.

Just checked their privacy policy:

> By using Virginia Mercury, you consent to the collection and use, in accordance with this policy, of the information you provide to us.

This means they don't comply with GDPR.

Although unless they do business in Europe, there would not be any legal recourse for the EU right? I'm always surprised that any business that can block all EU/GDPR users without impacting their business would even need to care about the laws in those places.

I guess the EU could fine them and then force Google to hand over this newspapers advertisement income, and Google would probably comply since they want and need to do business in the EU.

I wonder what makes Europe so special it can demand companies outside of Europe comply with European law.

Well, the US certainly seems to think the rest of the internet should follow their laws, so fair is fair.

If they want to do business in europe they should follow the european laws.

This site clearly doesn't want to, but you still have people like the GP and others here complaining. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If commenters here want sites to have the option to not deal with Europe, then they shouldn't also turn around and chide the sites for making that choice.

I wish I could upvote this twice. They're literally trying to comply with European law by disabling the site for Europeans.

Note I’m not complaining; my comment was not sarcastic. This is a simple news website run by a nonprofit. Its data collection is probably limited to an off-the-shelf analytics solution.

You probably should have added that context in the original comment. It came off as quite sarcastic.

Well they could just ignore the GDPR, like probably 80+% of the world's websites (of course then someone would complain how dare they ignore EU law...)

It's simply impossible to be aware of all the laws in the world. At some point the simplest and most realistic thing to do is to ignore what does not directly concern you.

From what someone else has commented they are accessible from Norway, so they may already be in breach of the GDPR depending on how they track visitors. Are the Norwegian authorities going after a small-ish organization from Virginia? Nope. They are not even aware that those guys exist and won't bother anyway.

I do agree with you, though, that it is absolutely fair for non-EU websites that don't want to have anything to do with the GDPR to block EU visitors.

Probably because advertisement on webpages pay out regardless of if I as a European click on it.

It can't.

A lot of local US press seems to have gotten bad legal advice.

I gather a lot of “local” press is owned by the same conglomerate