Another European here: I think the law is fine. How companies, specially US companies react to it, that is not.

1. A ton of Health related websites in US refuse to work in Europe, because they are NOT willing to let you visit without sensitive data being grabbed with cookies. I truly do not understand how US people are ok with this.

2. The law says that you can't make hard to refuse cookies, yet many US-based sites I visit have shady, shady practices, for example many you have to click a button to see all the sliders for individual cookies, and when you click that button, it switches the orders of the buttons, so that the button you just clicked become "accept all", and the previous "accept all" button becomes "save current settings". Thus if you double click/tap by accident you accept all.

3. The sites that most often piss me off with shady cookie banner that tries its hardest to force you to opt-in to tracking, are ones that use a company called "Admiral", that according to LinkedIn is from Florida. https://www.linkedin.com/company/getadmiral/

The year is 3157. Each time you access a new resource on the shared data substrate, you are required to accept something called a "Cookie." You have no idea what they are or why. Your crewmates say it has something to do with the homeworld, but you just shrug and prepare for the hyperspace jump.

There is one solution for the cookie notices that is very seldomly talked about: just don't use any marketing cookies, then you don't need consent from the user :)

Yes, housing and web cookies, equally important for one's life.

That ain't us.... kind of. That's the websites deciding to follow the letter of the law (or a spiteful, capitalist interpretation, taking it right to the line) instead of the spirit of the law.

OK, unintended consequences of legislation. But those cookie banners are not mandated, exactly. They don't need to be there. It's the companies deciding to do it that way, so they can keep gobbling data.

It's like if the building companies implemented the 2nd staircase, but only so they could measure who is going up and down it. Not for saving lives.

If they were opt in, or unnecessary tracking wasn't implemented in the first place, then the banners could be elegant or gone.

But I do agree that the legislation (especially the ultra focus on cookies specifically) was... blinkered & short sighted.