> GDPR .. All they did was made the web experience worse with cookie pop up banners.
That's bullshit. I have been in the room when tech teams have had a good hard look at their databases, and set expiry polices on old tracking data. Why? GDPR compliance.
The knock-on effects in data leaks that never happened is large.
Characterising GDPR as merely bureaucracy and cookie banners is shallow and wrong.
I don't think that you know anything about the subject. Please do not repeat this nonsensical claim.
You see one effect, and confidently claim "all they did was effect one". So you have sufficient breadth of domain expertise to know that nothing else happened as consequence? Or just a very myopic self-centred world-view?
The thing is, if you're not a EU citizen or resident then the benefits are not for you, that's how legal jurisdiction works. So then, do you argue from meanness: it doesn't benefit me, so we should get rid if and the way that it benefit's others, or from inclusion: Why can't my legal jurisdiction have something similar?
You also have to ask yourself, if all you know is some reaction involving sites putting up cookie banners, from way outside; why you would consider yourself well informed enough to reach a conclusion that "that's all they did", and share it.
It's the websites themselves that make the experience worse. Nobody forced them to have cookie pop up banners. GDPR simply forced them to be upfront about what they're doing and get permission - and they chose to be in your face and dark-pattern about it.
The "web experience" was infinitely better before ads and tracking infested everything.
> When was this mythical time the web wasn’t ad ridden?
Seems like ages ago. Webrings and link directories. Every page was hand-made by a passionate human, for other passionate humans, about subjects they cared about.
Now it's 99.99% ads, tracking, engagement, spam, link farms, generated garbage, outrage, and now AI nonsense.
There's so little to bookmark (i.e. care about) that browsers dropped support for bookmarks. Just think about that. No place worth remembering nor revisiting anymore.
I can't say exactly when I first noticed how pervasive and intrusive web advertising was getting but it was at least 10 years after I started using the web regularly (~1994).
I have some issues with GDPR implementation but this is just straight-up disconnected from reality; GDPR is relatively popular in Europe. If anything, most stats that I've seen suggest that Europeans generally want privacy laws to go further.
>All they did was made the web experience worse with cookie pop up banners.
That was not the GDPR. The GDPR does not talk about cookies anywhere.
It's the ePrivacy Directive (from 2002, amended in 2009) that deals with cookies (or any type of storage on an end user's device). It's the ePD that says if you set cookies and it's not strictly necessary to provide the service then you must get consent.
The only change the GDPR made in this area was tightening up the definition of "consent" to actually mean consent and not merely lack of disapproval.
It seems like you're trying to apply an analogy, but I can't make out what it is. What, specifically, will happen if the EU mandates device support that is like cookie pop up banners? (As an aside, GDPR did a lot of privacy-related things that have nothing to do with cookies.)
