And there are famous examples how California environmental regulations bring up the quality of products US-wide so everyone benefits from safety and consumer protections not just people in california.
In both cases, this is because it's easier to just have ONE version of a product if your market subset (EU, California) is big enough to justify it becoming the DEFAULT version of the product.
I...am truly terrified this is where we are heading with censorship and Chinese policies and the rest of the free and open web. At what point do companies that have to censor information for their chinese audience decide it's just less of a hassle to have the same censorship apply blanketly world-wide?
This has already happened. The U.S. has much more strict standards regarding nudity than the rest of the world in general, but the world has largely adopted U.S. norms, and nudity is now censored worldwide. So much for multi-culturalism.