It's good to see Backblaze confirming that their GPDR compliance will benefit all of their users. That's definitely been a hope of mine as someone who doesn't live in the EU, so hearing that is encouraging.
For any greenfield development, why would we develop it twice? We have to solve every business problem we have for the EU; why would we solve it differently, to address the same problems, elsewhere?
For non-greenfield development, why would we keep two codebases and sets of infrastructure around that we have to support? Better to consolidate. Especially given the positive word of mouth it would generate compared with "Yeah, we're not as careful about your privacy because you're not in the EU".
The -only- case where it makes sense to do something different outside of the EU is if there's a key bit of value that we literally can't capture in the EU due to the GDPR, and we want to capture it elsewhere. Now, that's still alarming (in that we could have the privacy haves and have nots), but I just don't know how common that will be, or whether companies would find it worth doing.
"This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union..."
(Ch 1, art 3, para 2)
There’s many other regulations that only apply to citizens and not based on location.