Good EU regulations
(actuallygoodregulations.eu)143 points by saubeidl 18 hours ago
143 points by saubeidl 18 hours ago
> “Cars must include modern life‑saving tech like automatic braking and lane‑keeping.”
I rarely drive my car. When I do, 99% of the time it's within a few kilometers of my house. I have no need for lane keeping or automatic braking in city traffic, it's barely moving to begin with.
My car is also getting old and will soon need replacing. Ten years ago you could buy a brand new small car for well under €10k. Sure, it didn't have all the bells and whistles but I have no need for those anyway. Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car precisely because of the safety regulations, emission standards and the fact that it's practically impossible to buy a car with an ICE anymore.
I understand the need for these things for cars that are driven daily, but why do they have to apply to cars that are mainly used for short trips to the grocery store? It's making cars unaffordable for the vast majority of people.
> "Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car precisely because of the safety regulations"
Not really. There are many reasons why new cars are more expensive than they used to be. But safety features like AEB and lane assist are a relatively small part of it. Adding AEB specifically is estimated to cost $100-$300 per vehicle in the US, and it wouldn't be much different in Europe.
And AEB is proven to work: reducing the rate of accidents by 40% or more. A small price to pay if it prevents the car getting damaged even once in it's life, let alone preventing an injury or death.
Also, it will depend on your location specifically, but there are plenty of new, entry-level vehicle models sold in Europe for well under €20k, including taxes and on-road costs.
> Adding AEB specifically is estimated to cost $100-$300 per vehicle in the US, and it wouldn't be much different in Europe.
Isn't this exactly the issue? Any given thing is "only" $300 but you add one of these requirements a year for several decades straight and now you've added thousands of dollars to the price of a car.
> And AEB is proven to work: reducing the rate of accidents by 40% or more.
It reduces the rate of accidents that occur under certain circumstances. Pretty good chance that those circumstances are "in a city in traffic". But then the feature is required on all cars, even when the owner knows they'll rarely if ever be driving it under the conditions where it's useful. Or worse, when they know they'll be commonly driving under circumstances where it's more likely to encounter a false positive and cause an accident.
Most price increase over last 10-15 years is not safety equipment. Regular inflation was massively compounded by the covid chip shortages / missplanning / greed / whatever ratio of factors one subscribes to.
Note, while I do not expect we will convince each other via interwebs, every safety advance from winter tires to abs to safety belts to airbags to glass that doesn't shatter etc has had a "but I don't need it because I don't drive much | I am awesome driver | it could not happen to me | etc". I don't think it's binary, I think regulation over reach is a definite thing, I just don't think massive increase in car prices over last 5 years is because companies are forcing safety equipment on awesome drivers who don't need it.
Case in point, I got the last kia rio model with all the fancy equipment and detection and even wireless carplay for 18k before they dropped the model. They don't sell a car like that anymore. Next cheapest car kia sells me right now is 26k or more - with absolutely no more safety features to justify / blame the massive price jump :-(
Because you're potentially moving several thousand kilos at huge speed, and the people that can find themselves in front of them should not have to trust your judgement of how safe you'll usually need the machine to be.
I almost died on a freeway when my Subaru Outback decided there was something in front and engaged full braking.
110 kmh to 40 before it realized it was wrong.
pure luck nobody was following too close.
I’ll be sure to tell that to the poor person on a bicycle in the middle of the road in front of me when I come around a blind curve and can’t jump lanes so as not to hit them.
“So sorry I squished you, my lane assist wouldn’t let me move out of the way in time.”
Is there a lane assist that won't let you change lanes?
I've driven several brands and they just shake wheel or exert like 5% gentle nudge. But maybe there are brands that will actually forcefully prevent lane change without signal (which is automatic / reflexive for most people who'd have good reflexes but I digress).
I'm not at all saying that all Automation is good or that cars always know better than me, but I do want to understand if this is a made-up strawman argument or has anybody ever actually failed to change lanes due to lane assist.
You are arguing in bad faith. You are also creating a straw man argument attempting to rubbish a feature that works acceptably well in 99% other use cases even if your scenario is legitimate.
If there is a blind corner you should slow down enough that you can safely stop if there are obstacles in the road. You don't know what's in the oncoming lane, so you can't assume that it'll be safe to blindly swerve into it to avoid something in your lane.
Secondly, lane keeping does not lock your steering wheel preventing you from changing lanes if you need to. The additional force required to override it is the difference between steering with your pinky and gripping the wheel with your hand.
you do realise that most people slow down for blind curves for exactly this reason, right?
pre-empt potential dangers and adjust driving accordingly. if you’re concerned that you might have to act due to an unseen/unknown danger — then slow down.
it shouldn’t be necessary to swerve out when driving except as a choice of absolute last resort (ie something/someone jumped in front of you inside braking distance and you’ve got no other safe option, in which case you’re probably fucked anyway).
Fortunately automatic emergency braking is another tech that hopefully your car also has.
> Because you're potentially moving several thousand kilos at huge speed
No, I’m not. My current car weighs less than a thousand kilos (945 to be precise) and the speed limit in basically the entire city is 30km/h.
Newer cars are ‘several thousand kilos’ especially because of all the regulations. Just being an EV adds a significant amount of weight due to the battery.
"I don't need a curb cut or a seatbelt, so I won't benefit from society having them" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect )
Dropped kerb in British English for those like me who had no idea what a curb cut was.
I agree with everything you wrote. But the real harm with most of these regulations are the unintended consequences, and second order effects.
Say you don't really think <10k cars belong on the road. Sure. But that could just lead to more dangerous forms of transportation like e-bikes or scooters. Or people are restricted to where they can work and live.
An example in the US is Obama era fuel efficiency standards for sedans had lower standards for SUVs. Fast-forward 20 years, nearly every car is an SUV. But it takes a few steps to figure out what the effects actually are.
But how sure are you that it was the fuel efficiency standards that led to more SUVs? Feels like bad reasoning, unless you have more evidence.
It has happened several time in the last few years in Norway and UK. Most were the riders themselves but at least once in Norway it was a pedestrian.
It's rare but not unknown.
E-bikes are literally good for your health. Especially for aging people and people that would not ride normal bike that distance. They are also massively more safe for third parties you encounter.
The move from cars to e-bikes would be generally unintended benefit
>> Ten years ago you could buy a brand new small car for well under €10k. Sure, it didn't have all the bells and whistles but I have no need for those anyway. Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car
If you are looking for car without bells and whistles you can buy a new car for €15k. €30k+ is a price tag for much more than basic car.
Indeed, I watched a €15k car TV commercial literally 2 minutes ago.
You can say the same things a about seatbelts and airbags. And people did.
I recently rode a scooter for couple of times, and I find it is the best thing to move around in neighbourhood. It is convinent, parking is easy, cheap to run. Everyone should have one electronic scooter.
Lane assist is more often annoying and dangerous than helpfull. It assumes lane markings are good/perfect, which over here is a very false premise.
If my ancient Model S can't see the road markings it won't engage lane keeping and makes a noise to alert you to that fact. Similarly when the lane markings disappear, it flashes a red warning in the instrument cluster and sounds an alarm.
For your use case, the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
But perhaps you are making a larger point about "things I consider unnecessary adding $$ to the base cost of every vehicle." I would say, to that, that
- your governments and voters consider them important for societal reasons, e.g. airbags so you can walk away from a crash, or cameras to help crushing a child when reversing. Presumably you are ok with this..or not?
- the car manufacturers in the EU are politically powerful and absolutely fearful that if the EU allowed the full range of global vehicles into the European market, they would be crushed overnight. Why buy a VW when you can get any number of Chinese minis, or Indian econoboxes, or even a cheap kei car. I guarantee that China keeps Daimler-Benz and VW execs up at night and that they have the full support of their workers when they spend money to lobby against low cost foreign imports...
> the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
It’s a quadricycle and not a real car, though.
Also I’d bet that VW/etc. executives are more fearful of Chinese equivalent’s of their mid/high-end models which cost the same as Europran manufacturer’s budget options.
Not tiny/ultra-budget/featureless vehicles which wouldn’t be that popular in Europe.
The issues with the Ami or anything similar or most cheap barebones models is that you can get a much nicer used car for the same price.
Modern cars are also much more reliable and last longer than they used to several decades back reducing the demand in the budget segment.
> For your use case, the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
That car is not suitable for my use-case. Any situation where I would use that car is one where I would use my e-bike instead. I basically use my car for those occasions where I just need to transport a bit more than I can take on my bike. It doesn’t have to be huge, but that Ami is just not enough.
I just use a trailer[1], I find it bonkers that one would use a car only for urban transportation. If I wasn't going regularly in remote area with my partners and my kids, I wouldn't even own a car.
[1] I like cargo bikes but storage can be a challenge compared to a trailer you can fold and remove the wheels when not in use.
Cheapest Fiat Panda seems to go for €14,700[1], so colour me sceptical on that "€30k+ for a new small car". In a quick check, it seems it was about €10k in 2011.[2]
The price increase is more than inflation, but you can't just assume that it's primarily due to safety regulations and emission standards.
[1] https://www.fiat.it/omni/configuratore/#/customize?color=CL-...
[2] https://supercarblondie.com/how-much-the-fiat-panda-has-incr...
> Cheapest Fiat Panda seems to go for €14,700
Cheapest Fiat Panda goes for €19,990 in my country. Taxes on new cars are enormous here.
That seems to be the only ICE model they still sell, and for how long will they stil sell that? The even smaller Fiat 500e is €28,990.
€20k is still a third off from your earlier €30k+. And when I checked yesterday evening I saw several cars in similar price ranges.
And now you're saying that "enormous taxes" are partly responsible for price increases, instead of just regulations and emission standards, which demonstrates my point exactly: there are many reasons cars are more expensive.
Stop shifting the goalposts. The argument was no cars are available sub 30k, and that was proven wrong.
Now you are arguing that <€30k cars might not he available in the near future, which no one is disputing.
Then you use the existence of a <€30k ev to prove your point?
Whose home?
From the source I found, it's the patient's home, not the driver's.
The first example I saw (think the order might be randomized?) was an EU ban on plastic straws, which is silly. Straws are a negligible fraction of plastic waste, and have no good substitute ("compostable" plastic straws are also banned; paper straws fall apart easily; metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing). This would flunk any serious cost/benefit analysis. You can hide the costs by making them regulatory instead of financial (the inconvenience of not having plastic straws doesn't appear in GDP stats), but the costs are still there, they're just hidden.
Pets remove plastic and instead poison ourselves.
A 2023 Belgian study[0] tested 39 brands of straws (paper, bamboo, glass, stainless steel, and plastic):
Paper and bamboo straws most frequently contained PFAS, sometimes at high levels.
Plastic straws also contained PFAS, but less consistently.
Stainless steel straws were PFAS-free in that study.
That was the first one for me as well and I was surprised they included it. I have never seen a disposable straw that does the job well, except for plastic. I actively avoid restaurants that use the cardboard straws because of it. That's how bad they suck. I can't believe the EU was foolish enough to ban plastic straws when there just isn't an actual viable alternative.
Giving paper straws at coffee shops should be criminalised
The actual text is "Bans the worst beach‑litter plastics (straws, cutlery, sticks) and cuts pollution" and the tooltip says "Targets the most littered plastic items with bans, design and collection rules, and extended producer responsibility to clean up coasts and waterways."
I looked a bit further, it bans a long list of plastic single-use stuff: plates, cutlery, certain food containers, certain cups, and a bunch of other things. It also regulates some labelling for other single-use products.
It claims that "80 to 85% of marine litter, measured as beach litter counts, is plastic, with single-use plastic items representing 50% and fishing-related items representing 27%".
Saying it's just a "plastic straw ban is" ... eh, well, a straw man. And single-use plastics are a substantial source of litter/pollution (I didn't investigate the accuracy of this claim in-depth).
In conclusion, this seems about as accurate and good faith as the ol' "EU bendy banana myth".
You might as well ask how microplastics get into fresh snow in Antarctica - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61739159
> metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing
Boohoo. Don't use a straw then. Out of the billions of beverages consumed during the last 24 hours, it's a given that >95% were consumed without one.
It's also of course an entirely arbitrary line to draw. Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?
> Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?
Funnily enough, there are contingents of people who exclusively use paper plates and plastic cutlery. I think there's an interesting parallel there. Those kinds of people simply do not want the effort and cost of maintenance. I'm not particularly sympathetic to this mindset in either case, but still.
In part, the rest of society subsidises the price of cheap disposable items by paying for their disposal and clean-up. I'd much rather that the manufacturers were made to bear that cost, though I doubt that would be practical in a global market. Probably the easiest way to implement it would be to add a cleanup charge to the price of those items (e.g. like VAT).
On a related note, I'd want any branded litter (e.g. McDonalds cartons) to be charged back to the company - it should be their responsibility to deal with the rubbish they produce and they can easily add a small charge to each order.
The Germany municipality of Tübingen implemented a "Verpackungssteuer" (tax on single-use packaging, utensils). It was fought by the local McDonald's franchisee up to the highest relevant court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) and finally approved.
Dozens of other German municipalities were just waiting for the final decision to implement their own local tax.
Hilariously, right below your comment is this one:
> You could hold this up in a room full of American business owners and watch them all cringe like a pack of vampires witnessing a cross.
Not surprising that you'd find plenty of American business owners on.. an American startup platform!
“Take your streaming subscriptions with you: watch and listen anywhere in the EU.”
In other words, allow publishers to region lock digital content deals to a specific EU country, even though (in theory) the EU is "Single Market for goods and services".
There are good EU regulations. There are also some very bad onces.
Except that's not how it works. (So far) Each one of my subscriptions just show me content of the local country.
So say Netflix, it's say French Netflix, when I'm in France and so on. Same with Spotify.
The law is just setup so services can't block you from using your subscription in another country. Which honestly I don't think was a problem in the first place.
Now if there was a law to make these damn things give you all the language and subtitle options.... I'd be all for that.
Because the big problem (again Netflix is a good example) is when travelling, is for the most part subtitles are only in usually two languages. The native language of the country, and English.
On vacation and want to watch something in another language? Ok now you need a third language (English) in order to watch it.
Even though Netflix has the subtitles in every language.
If I travel anywhere in Europe, my Prime account is still locked to the same useless crappy Belgium catalogue because "licenses"
Meawhile the TV sites are region locked, so you can't watch Belgian TV from Spain because "licenses".
So much for the single common market.
How does the first entail the second?
The way I read the text of the law, it acknowledges that there are regional locking inside the EU, and you should be allowed to bring your subscriptions with you as you travel the EU.
Sounds like you would want the law to be a different law, enforcing the EU to be a single market for all intellectual property and subscriptions. I think that sounds like a good idea, but it's a different law.
“Your data. Your rules. Consent, transparency, security — and the right to say ‘delete it’.”
You see that HN? The right to delete my data? it's the law, please stop breaking the law and implement a way to delete my data as I see fit.
I’m sure most people who create regulations believe they’re making good ones.
What’s important is to assess whether the regulations had the intended result, and what the second and third order effects were. A lot of regulations, created in good faith, would fail this test.
I agree. It would be one thing if they did an independent analysis on the outcomes of each regulation and arrived at an evidence-based conclusion (and even then it would still be very difficult or impossible to achieve objectivity).
But from what I can tell, it basically boils down to "let's just read the bullet points for each one and put it on the list if they sound good", which is misleading and even dangerous. Chat Control should be on the list by those standards.
There seems to be a implicit assumption here that the world witouth the regulation is the 'natural' one, which should not be disturbed without good reason?
Not entailing regulations also has second and third order effects, and usually nobody is considering them (unless it can increase revenue).
I was expecting a site with this title to be a troll when you open it it’s just a blank page.
Site is down for me but I found this archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250823220326/https://actuallyg...
up for me — maybe try the vercel domain? https://actuallygoodregulations.vercel.app/
USB-C for your gadgets is not a good regulation. The hurdle to adopting anything better is probably too high to overcome now.
The relevant commission is supposed to re-assess and come up with new recommendations every 5 years.
If someone comes up with a better method for charging, they can get all the big device manufacturers in the room, convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.
This is not far-fetched. All the players relevant to internet, for example, collaborate to determine how web standards should evolve. It works pretty well. It's more or less the same companies who need to collaborate to build something better than USB-C.
We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.
But clearly there is a price for the standardisation, it makes progress slower. On the other hand it makes everyone's lifes easier. Just as with e.g electrical outlets in the house there is a time for exploration and innovation, and there is a time for standardisation. And we are ready for standardisation now, USB-c is good enough.
The "bureaucrats" are a proxy for the person buying the device. That's literally the point of representative democracy. The average person doesn't want to make a million decisions on technical standards, so they elect somebody they trust to make them for them.
> convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.
Only way they could actually prove that is by demonstrating it empirically. i.e. by implementing the technology in products which consumers use.
Any government commission is inherently incapable of making a legitimate proactive decision is such case. You might as well use some sort of a lottery system at that point..
Well, physical interoperable things are done by committees. You need the industry players involved if you want new interoperable standard to be widely spread. Unless it is one of the first movers.
Say how would you improve speed of copper based ethernet. Using nearly same cables and connectors? Every party making the chips must agree on very specific details.
> fewer chargers, less e‑waste, less drawer chaos.
care to mention what negates those things to make it a “not good” regulation?
as a consumer, i think it’s a good thing to not need Nx different charging cables / plugs to go away for a weekend. usb-c is basically the de-facto standard for charging all but apple devices anyway.
hardware manufacturers might have a different opinions/motivations (but that was kind of the point really wasn’t it)
Everything seemed to have been moving towards USB-C regardless for a few years now, so it seems somewhat superfluous at this point in time? Apple was a major holdout though, due to Apple reasons.
Not strongly against it as such, but also not entirely convinced it's needed either.
Well I did say "somewhat superfluous", not "entirely superfluous" :-)
This is where the up- and down-sides need to be considered. Everyone moved from micro-USB to USB-3 because it was easier and better, and this will now be harder (not impossible, as another comment says, this is supposed to be evaluated 5 years). There may also be special cases where there's a good reason to use something other than USB-C Is that a big problem? Maybe not? I don't know.
They should have let apple continue selling garbage connectors so I can’t use my wife’s phone adapter to charge my phone. and have to buy an iphone charger because it is better(not)
I hear your concerns, but the future is probably wireless charging and wifi communication
What would be the next better feature for a plug? It seems USB-C has it all except for being expensive on the port side with the muxers. Anything different would require tossing a bunch of still useful things. It supports fast charging and good data rates.
That's the entire problem though, isn't it? Now we'll never know.
The one thing I can think of off the top of my head is some sort of magnetic connection similar to macbook chargers to prevent damage when the cord gets pulled out. (Also I would like the USB-3 standard to not suck, but that's never happening and doesn't relate to the physical hardware anyways)
> That's the entire problem though, isn't it? Now we'll never know.
There are definitely a lot of harmful regulation, but this one is amazing with close to no downsides. For one, there are magnetic adapters for everything nowadays, including USB-C ports so you can have your cake and eat it too. Second is the environmental impact of the old charger ecosystem. I lost count of how many cables and chargers I have that are now trash^1. Third one is that historically standardizing interfaces was great for innovation.
^1: Here is the various USB e-waste that I have - usb micro C (2 separate types with same name), micro usb super speed (this one is particularly cursed), mini-usb types A and B, and normal USB type A and type B.
> Here is the various USB e-waste that I have - usb micro C (2 separate types with same name), micro usb super speed (this one is particularly cursed), mini-usb types A and B, and normal USB type A and type B.
Catch just two more and you can challenge the USB trainer in Viridian City!
The protocol was flawed in its design in that it does not standardize or communicate the capabilities of the cable. How do I know whether it’s charging only, data, or thunderbolt? No standard way to understand this
Sounds like someone should make a US version of the site. (I genuinely think it would be very helpful)
I don't think the point of it is to show that these regulations are exceptional or anything. Seems to me to just be highlighting the number of regulations that we have that can make life better.
Sometimes a regulation is bad before it’s good. For example: toilet flush volume.
We used to have 5 gpf toilets. They worked okay. They clogged on occasion but not too often. When they clogged, they would overflow after 1-2 flushes. 5 gallons was enough to keep the poop and toilet paper flowing through the drain pipes once they made it out of the toilet. They used a lot of water (5 gallons per flush!). They had basically no interesting technology to speak of.
Then regulations required less water, and the new toilets were bad. They were basically the same designs, using less water, and they regularly failed to flush, they clogged frequently, and they even contributed to downstream clogs because 2-ish gallons of slowly draining water didn’t get all the waste moving adequately.
Now, after years and years of bad toilets, the industry caught up. Modern toilets use even less water (often under 1.3gpf), but they use that water effectively. They flush well, generally considerably better than the old 5gpf toilets. They rarely overflow. They send the waste through the pipes forcefully. And they use less water! The industry even has standardized testing for flush performance.
I wonder if better regulation could have managed the transition to avoid the interim terrible toilets. Perhaps the performance tests should have come first, then a period of financial incentives for toilets that outperformed legacy toilets along with mandatory labeling with the water usage and performance data, and only actual requirements to use less water after good enough toilets were available.
> What the hell is gpf?
My guess would be gallons per flush
It's a cool concept, but let's be honest: it's what the author thinks are good regulations. And it only ever can be, because policy is subjective.
I happen to agree with almost all of them, and most doubt is the devil in the details. The efficiency one, for example - if efficiency in an appliance comes at the expense of longevity (ie, it uses less materials or R&D is put into power use over anything else) then that may be a net negative. And the GDPR, a great regulation for customer data, has had the side effect of putting cookie law banners everywhere which makes the web more frustrating.
And I hate to say it, because it's my own weird ick, but I will forgo eating if the only utensils are wood. Simply cannot handle the feeling of it against my teeth and tongue. Thank God there are newer compostable single use utensils becoming common.
> And the GDPR, a great regulation for customer data, has had the side effect of putting cookie law banners everywhere which makes the web more frustrating
I say it countless times, but no. Data harvesting Big Tech put cookie banners everywhere and make the web frustrating for you. If they respected Do Not Track, they would not need to show you the banner. Instead, they don't take it into account and prefer to show you a banner that takes up all page instead of having a small banner that asks you if you want to agree to optional cookies.
That doesn't pass the sniff test. If a masked assailant in the street is going to rob me, but has to say a certain sentence before so and almost uniformly does, that speaks to the legal priorities of those making the laws.
If hoovering up my data is bad, make it illegal. Don't wrap it up in niceties and then deflect the blame.
The priority of the GDRP was that you needed your users' consent to process their personal data. The industry answer—cookie banners—is something that the industry created because their tracking incentives were higher than their users' experience.
Do Not Track was a thing since basically forever and the industry willfully chose to ignore it.
If you want to keep using websites that have dark patterns and track you, that's on you. I would argue it's even better than before because at least the average user would notice he's being tracked and the website makes it clear that the user's interests are not aligned with the website's owner.
Blaming it on the lawmakers—which I use as mockery as much as the next guy—is of bad faith, in my opinion.
I'm 90% sure that this wouldn't pass, even in jurisdictions like Washington State where mutual combat is legal.
The EU passed laws regarding cookies. Were they so inept as to not understand how cookies are used, or are they in cahoots with the bad actors to give them an out? Hanlon's Razor is not kind to the regulations (/regulators) either way.
The people you’re attempting to make fun of are the British, who are famously not part of the EU anymore.
But some dozens have been raided/swatted/sued/had their devices confiscated, by posting their opinions about some politicians in whichever social media, not limited to facebook.
edit: Especially in Germany.
I actually can't tell. The majority of these are literally examples of bad regulations. They have mass appeal without care for 2nd order effects.
The top of the page is a banner rallying against a regulation that would fit right in on the page.
And the fact that the site is a laggy mess just makes it a bit surreal.
Amusing to see GDPR there. It's the law that delivers the most of avoidable user friction online, by far.
It's like they saw how annoying the existing "cookie laws" were and said "we can make it worse!"
GDPR might have had good ideas, but the implementation is so botched it's not even funny. Everything related to cookie consent should have been standardized and delegated to browser settings.
> Everything related to cookie consent should have been standardized and delegated to browser settings.
Rather ironic to say this when the entire reason this stuff has been needed is that Google, which has monopolized the browser market, is an advertising company whose core business is tracking people in the first place and does everything in its power to obstruct anything that weakens it.
Cookie Consent is from ePrivacy Directive and not GDPR.
I really sometimes feels there is lot of Cognitive dissonance going on with GDPR. On one side there is hate for these banners. On other hand they also hate when say phone company sells their location data to whoever pays... Or when this data leaks.
So exactly how is that later part of selling data and gathering it unnecessarily supposed to be avoided if not by regulation like GRPR?
Maybe it is just entirely different people, but there must be some overlap.
Anyone ever bought shoes or clothes or tires in the EU? The sizes are absolutely not metric and a complete mess! Not to start about traffic rules, sizes of streets, traffic signs etc. Nothing is regulated, nothing is standardized. But the worst missing regulations which are keeping the continent back are missing standards for train traffic in the EU: E.g. there are about 10 different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_electrificatio... in the EU. In addition their are thousands of incompatible regulations regarding train signals. The EU could have high speed trains from Lissabon to Helsinki. But I guess the US will introduce metric units before the EU will solve their train traffic mess.