That's not a comment on whether the regulations are good or bad. It's just that, as a business, if you're not a profitable customer or potential customer, I don't want to interact with you if you create any risk/cost for me.
The Internet (including the Web) of the mid to late-ish 90s may have been refreshingly non-commercial and open relative to today but it was also much smaller.
That's because it's increasingly mirroring the real world when it comes to nationalism, regulations, barriers to access, censorship, culture. That outcome was always inevitable, nothing could prevent it. Nations were never going to allow an unencumbered Internet or Web to remain in their territory.
If you think the Internet is geofenced now, just wait until you see what it looks like in another ten years. It's going to get dramatically worse. It'll be almost unrecognizable compared to the Internet of 2010. We're only maybe 1/3 the way to our fully balkanized destination.
There is also no going back. Governments now understand the technology and will increasingly tightly regulate it accordingly, no matter what it looks like or what it's called. They no longer view it as a separate entity, they view it as falling under the same exact regulatory domain as everything else in the physical space that they claim dominion over.
If you have any business or development dreams you want to pursue on the Internet, do it as soon as possible, do not wait. The Internet and Web will only suck more in the future.
But in terms of suckiness I think that it's not primarily caused by regulation (although the cookie law does try very hard to inflict maximum pain for zero gain). The funding model is just broken and I don't really see a way to fix it without losing even more freedom and privcy.
I’m not commenting on whether they are a good idea to use, but they are easy.