[umichguy]

Kia ora! The "issue" here is that most sites which want to cater to worldwide audiences pretty much try to comply with influential legislation to stay on the good side. And GDPR/EU regs wield a big enough stick and come from a large enough region that you can't ignore them unless you want to block your site out completely to traffic coming from the EU. So they try and just do a worldwide rollout, irrespective of where you live. Of course, you can always implement this selectively but maybe more tricky to small and medium businesses, so they play and safe. Probably. I am speculating here.

[q12we34rt5]

The "EU" as a market is only important to the largest players or as an after thought once you have a solid footing in e.g. the US for one simple reason. The EU has too many languages so you can't just target the entire population in one shot like you can in single language even larger economy in America. Even if you wanted to target the entire EU, in my personal experience I can tell you that some web services work well in a place like Germany yet fail hard in France so most small to mid-level players are only going to go in places where they make the most money and it may be years before they ever end up in say Italy or the Netherlands. All that adds up to the EU regulations having a much smaller impact on most startups than you seem to believe. And that impact will be zero on the ones who look at the regulatory landscape as it exists now and just decide to stay out.

Edit: I see somebody chose to express disagreement via mouse rather than keyboard. Interesting.

[qwerty456127]

As a European who has never been to an English-speaking country yet has always preferred English versions of everything (and all my friends are bi- or tri- (or more) lingual, reading something in English or in our mother tongues is a near-zero difference for us) I wonder what is the actual proportion of Europeans who can not be targeted by a service in English... I've heard learning English is not particularly popular among e.g. Italians but in Scandinavia and in France almost every "millennial" is more or less fluent in English and comfortable with it.

PS: I didn't downvote, I never do - I'm a downvote-hater :-)