Some US news sites like the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune restrict access from EU as GDPR goes into effect
Context & Ripple Effects
GDPR took effect on May 25, 2018, and within days a set of US news sites — including the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune — chose to block European visitors outright rather than rework their data practices for the new law. The head of the European Data Protection Board publicly criticized the move, arguing publishers had had plenty of time to prepare.
The episode sits between two other early GDPR responses: Facebook's April decision to shift its non-European users onto US terms of service, shrinking the law's reach to about 400M of its users (per Reuters), and Brussels' campaign to export GDPR-style rules through trade deals with Brazil, Japan, and South Korea.
First-order effects
- The LA Times and the Chicago Tribune immediately forfeit all EU traffic and any advertising revenue tied to it, treating full GDPR compliance as costlier than losing the audience.
- EU readers lose direct access to major US metro dailies, and the EDPB's chair signals that regulators view the blocks as an avoidable failure, not a neutral business choice.
Second-order effects
- US publishers that did invest in compliance can capture the European audience the blockers abandoned, turning a legal burden into a competitive edge against rivals like the Tribune and the LA Times.
- Facebook's terms-of-service restructuring shows other large platforms the cheaper path: re-drawing user jurisdictions to keep most of their base outside GDPR's scope rather than paying to comply globally.
Third-order effects
- Two months on, more than 1,000 US news sites and roughly a third of the 100 largest US newspapers remain unavailable in Europe (Nieman Lab), suggesting the web is fragmenting into regional access zones where compliance costs decide who gets to operate across borders.
- With the EU tying data protection to trade negotiations with Brazil, Japan, and South Korea (NYT reporting), the blocking pattern points toward GDPR becoming a global default whose fixed costs favor Big Tech and squeeze smaller publishers — consistent with later assessments that the law cemented incumbents' dominance.
The trend: GDPR's arrival is redrawing the open web along jurisdictional lines, as publishers weigh compliance costs against simply cutting off entire regions.