[nnash]

> Should a car company from China have to comply to US safety regulations when selling cars to US citizens?

In your example, the car company is implicitly selling to a foreign country. When it comes to software/websites, a user from a foreign country is incidentally served rather than implicitly.

[point78]

The websites are profiting off the visitors no matter what country they're in. If they don't want to follow the laws then block the country.

[runeks]

So everyone who hosts a website has the obligation to read up on the legality of that particular website for all countries in the world, and block accordingly?

That doesn’t seem reasonable to me.

[point78]

Uh...yes? You think you can just open a business in country x, break their laws, then shrug your shoulders and say "Well it's legal where I'm from"

[HeadsUpHigh]

Which part of the ip is hard to decode? If you don't like how a country's laws are shaped, then stop selling there. You can't have your pie and eat it too. Either you obey the market laws and sell or you don't. If someone is using a VPN to get around your geo ban, then I think that's the user's implicit choice.

[int_19h]

Why should the onus of blocking content in some faraway country be on the company publishing it? If you don't want your country's citizens to have access to something, well then, time for a Great Firewall.

[HeadsUpHigh]

>If you don't want your country's citizens to have access to something, well then, time for a Great Firewall.

It's not the EU who wants to ban access to something. It's the provider who wants to benefit financially from selling that product( targeted ads) without having to comply to the laws of the country that the selling happens. There is no other market that you get to do that. Why should your web page be different?

[strken]

IP addresses aren't country codes, in the same way that phone numbers aren't permanent unique identifiers. If you block IP ranges, you'll let some European users through, and block some non-European users.

Is "at least we tried"-style blocking good enough?

[HeadsUpHigh]

>Is "at least we tried"-style blocking good enough?

Yea exactly. In absence of a mechanism to block users the discussion of who gets to police who is worthwhile. But if a company chooses not to comply with GDPR and at the same time doesn't utilize any available mechanism to block EU users then there is definitely intentional ignorance on their part.