Comment by Al-Khwarizmi
19 hours ago
The objetive, observable outcome is that before the law, websites don't have cookie banners. Since the law passed, they do. And they make the user lose time, and make navigation much more cumbersome, sometimes even impossible (not even 5 minutes ago, I had to go back on my phone because a newspaper article went into an endless loop after accepting the cookie banner).
It doesn't matter much what happened behind the scenes to cause that outcome. From a black-box perspective, it could be that
(a) the EU mandated the cookie banners, (b) the EU mandated to provide cookie settings in some generic form, and websites decided to use banners because it's easier, more lucrative, or even to put people against the EU, in spite of having other options that were better for the user. (c) the EU mandated a different thing and the annoying banners don't even comply with the law.
No matter what the case is, the fact is that the EU made the WWW worse with the law. Either due to an outright harmful law, or to a well-intentioned law with too many loopholes, or to a good law but lack of enforcement. Doesn't matter much for the end user. When you make laws that affect people's daily life, good intentions aren't enough.
The EU law is good for consumers & bad for advertising companies. In response to this, advertising companies have made the web a significantly worse user experience.
You can reasonably argue that if the EU had not taken action to reduce advertising companies' ability to abuse customer rights, then advertising companies would not have retaliated, & therefore the web would be a less annoying experience. You cannot reasonably argue though that this is some isolated one-sided situation where ad companies are devoid of culpability.
Your entire comment essentially amounts to ignoring an elephant in the room to sell a narrative that one "side" bears 100% of responsibility for the outcome.
It's not that I ignore the responsibility of advertising companies. It's just that I take for granted that they are bad. They are an adversarial actor, and they aren't accountable to me. My governments (including the EU) are.
If your government passes some badly-designed regulations that cause a rat infestation, you can be as angry at the rats as you want, but that won't be very useful. If you want things to actually change, it's the government you need to complain against, not the rats.