Its kind of funny how they just added a European Commission fines row on their income statement.
Many companies will attempt to follow the rules, even if they think that the probability of getting fined is low.
Note that the 2 main arguments and counter arguments: it helps protect people's information vs it increases the barrier of entry are NOT exclusive. Both can be valid at the same time and I believe that in many regulations they are both valid. That's how life works, a chain of compromises.
So yes, taking on new and unknown (to the creator) legal liability from some regulation is a great reason to shut down a side project.
If you have time/money or plan to make money, GDPR compliance isn't terribly difficult. But free/cash-strapped service providers would probably think twice before becoming compliant (which is why a lot of local US news websites just don't allow European visitors -- compliance is somewhat expensive, and local news in the US isn't doing too great right now).
[1] https://developers.trello.com/docs/personal-data-storage
But regardless, the overhead-inducing parts of GDPR really kick in when a company grows past certain size (250 employees), at which point it should be perfectly capable of handling them. But more importantly, upstarts aren't some protected class. Just because an upstart can't compete against the incumbent without resorting to abuse of personal data, doesn't mean abuse of personal data should be allowed. GDPR protects regular citizens from collateral damage to their privacy caused by market competition. If incumbents can do a better job not abusing the data, maybe they should get the benefits.
(Also, it's adtech we're talking about. Personally I want neither the upstarts nor the incumbents to exist, and I couldn't care less who GDPR privileges here.)
Adtech powers the internet and lets 99% of the content exist. Let's avoid the endless conversations over it. If you want every company to be treated the same, then every industry should be too.
RE adtech, I don't think we can avoid this conversation as long as all the problems this industry is causing persist. And I don't want to have every industry treated the same. In my books, adtech is right there with selling hard drugs on street corners, and factories polluting rivers; I'm fine with getting rid of all of them. I do not want that industry to grow. As for the "99% of the content", I'd honest to god happily see it disappear. It's mostly garbage that wastes people time; in particular, mass-produced content marketing tends to have negative information value, making people wronger than they were before reading it.
> "adtech is right there with selling hard drugs on street corners, and factories polluting rivers"
Those aren't industries and the trillion-dollar market caps of advertising companies speak to commercial value. The world is more than just you, so you don't speak for everyone and your singular interests do not matter at all in this discussion and you use an adblocker or stay off the internet if you want.
I always take the time to have in-depth conversations about adtech here but you haven't said anything other than state an emotional position about what you want the world to be like. That leaves nothing to discuss.
We won't really know until they get taken to court over it.