> Criminals and politicians have used it to get removed from search results. The news article might be there, but no one will find it.

Sure, there have doubtlessly been some cases of people abusing it, but that's an argument for refining how the law works, not scrapping the right entirely. The alternative is just "companies can collect and display whatever they want about anyone forever with zero recourse," which is obviously worse. If anything the fix is clearer rules about who qualifies, not throwing the whole thing out.

> Exactly my point. You cannot generalise about the EU and say "it does not happen in the EU"

Fair enough, and I'll concede that. But the same goes the other way, you can't make a blanket statement like "websites in the EU are censored/blocked" when that's simply not true in every EU country. Most people on HN talk about "The EU" like it's a singular borg entity with identical laws across the board, which it isn't.

> So, to be clear, you think its good that people in the EU cannot read some news sources?

The sites choosing not to serve EU users is on them, not the EU. The GDPR doesn't say "block European visitors," it says "if you collect their data, follow these rules." The sites are making a business decision that compliance isn't worth it, which again just tells you everything about how central harvesting user data is to their whole operation. If a news site is literally non-functional without hoovering up your personal data without consent, that's not the EU's fault, and frankly no one should be giving these privacy ruining entities anything anyways if that's the case.

You can't dump chemicals into the water table just because proper disposal is inconvenient and expensive, why do we suddenly clutch our pearls when the same logic is applied to people's privacy?

> Maybe your interests are too mainstream. I often find news stories I would like to read that are blocked for people from the UK and EU.

I read pretty niche stuff and have never once hit a wall here in NL. What specifically are you being blocked from? It's not something I've ever run into.