It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you

I live in Europe after growing up in the States. Every now and then, a link to an interesting news article is suggested to me. Clicking the link, I see this text:

  Our European visitors are important to us.
  
  This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we
  work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.

For my European friends, try a link like or or or or or ... or many of the other "local" news sources in the U.S. It's important to note: While these sites cover news in a particular region, we'd need to start calling each McDonald's a local burger joint under this classification.

At the bottom of each page: https://www.nexstar.tv> - If you click this link, you are not geoblocked! In fact, there are a ton of statistics showing just how many resources this media group has at their disposal to address releasing news articles to Europe. Save a click. It's 4 billion USD revenue, over 100 news sites and TV stations, and a reach into two-thirds of American households. This is no mom and pop operation. They just don't---or maybe can't---care.

I only focused on one media group, but there are others. Here's a news article from the same year GDPR began enforcement two years after its introduction in 2016: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44248448>

A little has changed, but not much! Chicago Tribune is finally available. NY Daily News? Can't access. Baltimore Sun or Orlando Sentinel? Also, no.

"Why are you complaining?" you might ask. "What is your goal?"

Besides the obvious---I'd like to read about the communities of my friends and former neighbors---I want two outcomes:

First, any giant search engine company with a news subdomain and 100,000 employees could stop suggesting/featuring geofenced articles to European residents. At least weight these results so they aren't the number one, front page feature. (Although in Google's defense, one can usually click the "Cached" button to get the linked story.)

Second, say something else. The people living across the Atlantic (and their pesky differences of opinion on privacy) can't possibly be more than an inconvenience at this point.

  You are in Europe. Mind your own business.

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Edit: First post. No idea how to get links to display properly even following "Formatting Options" instructions.

It‘s such an abhorrent marketing style of talking.

"Your life is important to us. Therefore we must kill you.“

I always read this as:

"Our European visitors are important to us BUT vacuuming all your data and selling to multiple bidders is importanter"

You wanna be obnoxious? Sure, go ahead, but I'll dislike your site more (and I have adblock so I have no qualms in accepting). Wanna pretend you're compliant by having an obvious non-compliant "solution" and think that will shield your responsibility? Now I'll just hate you and will probably bounce off your site

This:

> McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sorry.

conflicts with this:

> law is introduced, business figures out the easiest way to deal with it and get back to what they were doing, rinse and repeat.

So which is it? If they care about Brussels, then they are willing to go the extra mile. If they don't care, why put up the block anyways?

The complaint is about saying "we care" when they clearly don't.

It's perfectly reasonable for US media to block European users rather than deal with GDPR compliance, but why not be honest about it?