[IshKebab]

They could still make some money from showing non-tracking ads to European users and tracking ads to American ones. Perhaps not as much, but as they have already written the content I don't see why you would just give up on that revenue stream.

[ghaff]

The point is that, if I'm not making material money from EU residents today, it may be easier for me to just make it clear that I'm not trying to do business in the EU than figuring out if I need to do anything to become compliant. I may in fact be 100% compliant, but it may take effort to figure that out and there's potentially still some risk.

Personally, I do no tracking on my sites so it's irrelevant to me but I understand why news sites with primarily local readership would decide dealing with the EU is more trouble than it's worth.

[mlthoughts2018]

This could definitely happen, but would not make sense for the Chicago Tribune and LA Times, which are big corporate entities united as subsidiaries of Tronc, Inc., and could even pool resources to have one compliance office among them from the parent company.

For a large, well-capitalized company to make this choice, it’s an indication of a few possibilities:

- Tronc doesn’t practice anything close to adequate IT practices to even know its compliance status, and pefers not to invest in doing so.

- Tronc can’t remain profitable if displaying GDPR-compliant pages in EU (this seems fleetingly unlikely, given the specific attempts to grow digital subscribership by marketing the papers as more global).

- Tronc is trying to make a political statement, like a boycott, hoping that many companies do this and it puts pressure on mitigating GDPR.

So while I agree with you for some small businesses just not wanting to mess with GDPR compliance or risks, however small, it certainly isn’t aviable explanation for these newspapers.

[JackFaker]

It's likely that it's just side effect of months of institutional paralysis. The Chairman of Tronc stepped down earlier this year after allegations of misconduct and I believe they were negotiating the sale of the LA Times to an investor and the rest of the company to Softbank.