No. (Usual caveats, not a lawyer, not an expert). If you aren't storing the data tied to a specific person, you aren't profiling, otherwise "receiving an http request and logging that" would violate the GDPR, which it doesn't. Second, country isn't pii under the GDPR, the location would need to be more precise to be relevant. I think blocking the entire EU is lazy, but this is the non-est of nonsense.
Whenever I read "Blocking entire EU" I classify it as a romanticized revenge daydreaming. No sane western corporation will willingly eliminate an entity about the site of USA out of spite and take a profit hit just because of new PII protocol. Just look at FB, Google and the rest of the advertising companies. They bent over backwards trying to accodomate the law. But: GDRP will filter out businesses that existed in t…
Every single blog post had a set of people raging that we were assholes for doing this, but the reality was the cost of compliance just didn't make sense for the MVP. It was high 5 figures in cost which was just too much at the time. If we had achieved product market fit then the obvious move would have been to do that compliance to gain more customers, but we never quite got there.
I doubt GDPR gets to that level of cost, so the ROI looks a bit different. But I still think it's a reasonable decision to say "I simply won't do business in the EU because it costs more than I'll gain". A lot of companies also don't bother to go through the effort of printing the dual language labels required to sell their products in Canada, even though it's a decent sized market close to the US.
Tech, specifically the internet, has grown without regulation for a long time. But that era is over. These kind of decisions are routine in non-internet businesses where distribution, borders, and regulations exist. I suspect we're going to have to think a lot more about this in our work in the future.