Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

From Europe, I agree with big tech getting it. But i dont agree with random flower shop somewhere getting fined because they dont know how to deal with a fcking complicated, ever-changing law that is designed for megacorps who have the cash to just keep paying the fine and abusing everyone. I also dont agree with dealing with fcking cookie banners on every other website either.

The law got SO convoluted over 9 years of interpretation by the European courts that its now impossible to be 100% compliant. It now requires you to give an easy 'Accept' button to accept the listed cookies at the first pop up, but penalizes you if the user actually uses it to accept cookies because the user has to manually go through all the listed cookies and approve them by hand one by one.

So:

- If you dont provide the easy 'accept' button, you are in violation.

- If you do and the user actually clicks it, you are still in violation because you didnt make the user approve each cookie one by one

- If you give a list of cookies to the users and force the user to manually approve what he wants in the first pop up, you are still in violation because its not easy and your easy 'Accept' button is meaningless as a result

And this is just one of its contradictions. The more you dive, the more convoluted it gets. Its a sh*tty law that got more complicated over time and only helped megacorps.

People need to understand that the early days of the Pirate Party are gone and the current crop of tech-savvy politicians that remain from those days are those who made a career out of it. And like every politician who made a career out of something, the only way for those politicians to keep getting elected is by doing 'more' of what they have been doing. So they just keep bloating tech regulation to keep their career, making it difficult for everyone but the large corporations. It must also be noted that some of them sold out and are basically the tech lobbies' henchmen, pushing for American-style legislation to build regulatory moats for big corporations.

> [...] most websites just don't follow the law. Yes, they're doing illegal things, but it turns out enforcement is weak so the lawbreaking is so ubiquitous [...]

I just checked the major institutional EU websites listed here[0], and every single one (e.g., [1][2][3]) had a different annoying massive cookie banner. In fact, I was impressed I couldn't find a single EU government website without a massive cookie banner.

I don't know if it is due to the law enforcement being so weak (or if the law itself is at fault or whatever else). But it seems like something is not right (either with your argument or EU), given the EU government itself engages in this "lawbreaking" (as defined by you) on every single one of their own major institutional websites.

The potential reason you brought up of "law enforcement is just weak" just seems like the biggest EU regulatory environment roast possible (which is why I don't believe it to be the real reason), given that not only they fail to enforce it against third parties (which would be at least somewhat understandable), but they cannot even enforce it on any of their own first party websites (aka they don't even try following their own rules themselves).

0. https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/european-union/official-ser...

1. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en

2. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/

3. https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.

That's impossible. The network effects are too strong. Facebook may die, or even Instagram, but WhatsApp is so intermeshed with the majority of the world that it can only be taken out by a government.

> if you don't do anything "bad" then you don't need the banners.

Because that’s how it is. For instance why does a site need to share my data with over 1000 "partners“?

And the EU uses the same tracking and website frameworks as others so they got banners automatically.

It wasn’t a mistake but website providers maliciously complied with the banners to shift the blame.

Seems you fell for it.

Yes. I don't think you should have to show a popup to track the user's language preferences, whether they want a header toggled on or off, or other such harmless preferences. Yet, the EU ePrivacy directive (separately from the GDPR) really does require popups to inform users of these "cookies".