For us, it didn’t make sense to invest the amount of money we’d have to to establish compliance with the GDPR, or to invest in maintaining that compliance, and the liability that GDPR would introduce for us most certainly didn’t make sense.
Europe is worth almost nothing to us, we don’t market ourselves there because it’s a waste of money. The EU customers we have all sought us out, not the other way around. For us, the cost and liability is simply not worth it. I think you’ll start to see more businesses make this decision, based on facts and numbers. You can’t just cry that they’re all being hysterical or want to abuse they’re customers data and privacy. When you introduce expensive new regulations, that have very strong punitive elements, this is exactly what you’d expect to happen. Small to medium sized businesses will wear the most of the cost (while posing the least of the risk). Luckily for us, EU is worth close to nothing for us.
I expect that, at least in some obviously global markets like most e-commerce, GDPR compliance (as opposed to throwing the towel like you) will be treated like a certification of being a relatively non-evil and non-amateur business, with a significant impact outside the EU.
I remember the time we had very good privacy policies but getting that project to be compliant with COPPA was still a significant effort, so I think I get where you're coming from.
Once we became compliant, quite frankly, I felt a lot safer and more confident in affirming that our privacy policies were very good. Maybe it was some kind of sunk cost syndrome, but I was glad we did (were forced to do) it.
