Agreed. It’s a local newspaper in Wisconsin. They probably don’t have a single programmer on staff and get consulting ad hoc to fix issues with their Wordpress

Agreed. It’s a local newspaper in Wisconsin. They probably don’t have a single programmer on staff and get consulting ad hoc to fix issues with their Wordpress installation or whatever. I suspect they asked “what’s the cheapest way for us not get sued for GDPR?” the consultant asked “what percentage of your readers are in Europe?”, and when they relied “approximately zero,” the consultant said “I can just block those IPs for a hundred bucks.” Much easier than trying to understand what “tracking cookies” are when you don’t even understand what a web server is.