Why would you bother at all? If you are a local site by a local company on the other side of the world you don't need to block anyone, you just ignore foreign

Why would you bother at all? If you are a local site by a local company on the other side of the world you don't need to block anyone, you just ignore foreign laws. In the case of those news sites, though I suspect that most are owned by large multinational companies whose lawyers advised that blocking EU visitors is the only 100% sure way to avoid hypothetical retaliations by EU authorities.