Good EU regulations
actuallygoodregulations.eu
actuallygoodregulations.eu
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.
“So sorry I squished you, my lane assist wouldn’t let me move out of the way in time.”
Now accept our integrated telemetry gathering that reports directly to LexisNexis so insurance companies can raise your rates [0].
Surely you understand, think of the children!
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...
Criminalizing modifying your own car only stands to benefit the corporations that salivate at the mouth thinking of the data mining opportunities.
Not to mention, as others in the thread brought up, can invite issues of their own.
“This wasn’t illegal and now we made it illegal, we fixed the problem!”
How’s that been working out?
I’ll never drive a car that in any way takes control of the steering or brakes. Full stop. If I need to modify the car to disable that feature, I will.
At least I’m honest about it.
Pass all the laws in the name of good ideas for the children. If I disagree with it, I’m not going to obey it. I’m not unique in this.
I’m fucking tired of being told “I’m smarter than you and this is actually in your best interest, trust me.”
Did you know that child labor actually increased in India after laws that tried to eliminate child labor?
Let’s keep patting ourselves on the back that we can feel good about passing laws though.
I gave you a whole bunch of problems that have been fixed by passing laws.
> child labor actually increased in India after laws that tried to eliminate child labor
I did not. Which law are we talking about? 1948, 1952, 1986 or 2009?
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.
Putting a black box in your car that records everything without my consent - I'm with you on slippery slopes and ulterior motives.
A gentle gentle nudge that helps me on long distances - I'm honestly not with you :-/
I've driven Toyota, Ford, subaru and kia off the top of my head and while e.g. Toyota feels rougher than Honda, none of them approach anything that would even remotely stop, prevent, or even slow me down if I really want to change lanes, let alone if I did it forcefully in emergency. Can't speak for other brands and I definitely never drive a Tesla :-)
Clever try though.
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).
The parent commenter sounds exactly like one of those who don't slow down for blind curves.
Use some critical thinking.
Speed | Thinking + braking distance | Stopping distance
20mph | 6m + 6m | 12m (40 feet)
30mph | 9m + 14m | 23m (75 feet)
40mph | 12m + 24m | 36m (118 feet)
50mph | 15m + 38m | 53m (174 feet)
60mph | 18m + 55m | 73m (240 feet)
70mph | 21m + 75m | 96m (315 feet)
> https://www.theaa.com/breakdown-cover/advice/stopping-distan...
note that the braking distances are not for modern cars with advancements in braking tech etc.
it’s fairly simple logic.
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.
110 kmh to 40 before it realized it was wrong.
pure luck nobody was following too close.
Which is to say, in practice cars will be following too closely whenever there is high traffic volume, and systems that don't work under real life conditions are broken.
There are very few roads in my experience where long stretches are filled with high speed cars. The places that are filled with cars are usually around accidents and road works where the speed and hence separation distance are reduced.
I don't think a three second separation has any meaningful impact on throughput. perhaps someone with the necessary expertise and tools could simulate it.
Don't brake check on a highway. Also, semi-trucks exist.
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 remember some analysis saying that it is true for classic versions like sedan. But on SUVs it is a couple of times bigger...
Now, sales numbers are starting to plummet so I fully expect to see them blame everything from regulators to China unfair exports rather than admit it’s just a normal consequence of their own strategy.
Add to that that most of them have intentionally not taken the shift towards electric and away from diesel that the regulation forced on them, you get a pretty bleak picture. But, on that point, it seems that Germany will as usual cave in and drag the whole EU down with them so they might have been right.
From the source I found, it's the patient's home, not the driver's.
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.
Yeah, removing mass and decreasing velocity, while increasing sightlines and the controller's stake in avoiding accidents, is much more dangerous. /s
The move from cars to e-bikes would be generally unintended benefit
It's rare but not unknown.
as far as there is cycling infrastructure
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 :-(
(which is not good because now cars can drive on sidewalk)
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...
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously some people will make a poor choice, but that's just as true as legislators, and all costs are a trade off against what else you could have gotten for the money. In other words, all safety features that cost money have an opportunity cost, which is also measured in lost lives, so the ones that aren't effective or have diminished effectiveness under particular circumstances shouldn't be mandatory in all cases.
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 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.
Seems like taxes could be the larger factor then?
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?
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.
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.
In both cases, while mostly obvious to the human driver, following the lane markings would send you straight into the opposite lane.
My observation and intuition is most accidents are caused by people using their phone, driving under the influence, wrong medicine, being crazy or just too tired or too old.
Unless we are talking about full self driving those assistances only delay an accident at best.
I enjoy those features, they are convenient, but I do not consider them safety features.
They are not covered with PFAS anymore?
i avoid straws altogether.
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".
My entire point it's not just about plastic straws. I don't know why you need to reduce this to just plastic straws.
Poor and unregulated waste management is. Of course the fact that a lot of western countries were and still are exporting their plastic waste to poorer countries where they somehow end up in rivers and oceans.
However there is no inherent reason why plastic straws or anything else inherently have to be dumped into oceans.
Of course silly token measures are much easier than actually regulating the global fishing industry..
On a thread that is about someone misrepresenting a single-use plastic ban as a "plastic straw ban", this is very much not obvious at all.
As for the rest: if there is no plastic, then there is nothing to "waste manage". Or at least less, and mismanaged waste actually breaks down in a reasonable timeframe. It's been an issue for decades. Everyone knows about it. Nothing really changed.
It's a good example of why EU regulation sucks. It sounds like it solves a problem until you learn anything about the problem. Then it becomes clear it's all cost and no benefit.
The reason the EU passes all these rules is nothing to do with the actual problems themselves. It's because they think that by doing this they can forge a pan-European equivalent of the USA that reduces the existing nations to mere historical geographic regions. It seems to be some kind of simplistic idea that if most laws are written by the EU, and it has a flag, then it is a nation that can rival the US. If you believe that then to make it happen you have to pass a lot of laws.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Dozens of other German municipalities were just waiting for the final decision to implement their own local tax.
Banning straws is the "entirely arbitrary line to draw." Why not banning paper plates as well? Plastic bowls too?
> 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!
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.
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.
But it isn't, so maybe those aren't the standards?
Not entailing regulations also has second and third order effects, and usually nobody is considering them (unless it can increase revenue).
I did not grow up in the wild, and the default state of civilisation, even simple tribes, is certainly not unregulated. You are expected to take into account how your actions affect other people, and if you fail you will be sanctioned.
I perfectly understand people who wants little regulations. But my point is that choosing to not regulate something is also a choice, and for the big machine that is society, the fact that it's rooted in inaction does not make the outcome better, and thus not a better default either.
Not passing a law about something isn't normally a choice. There are infinity things you might conceivably not pass laws about, and you can't even think about them all. Leaving things undisturbed is the choiceless default, it happens even if no people are around, so focusing on something enough to disturb it is the choice.
At best you can argue that if someone is agitating to pass a law then this forces your attention to a topic, and then - if your job requires you to respond - that then implies a choice of whether to agree with them or not. This is how lobbyists get what they want. But you can just not put yourself in that position.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neither Google nor Cloudflare resolve the domain for me:
/opt/adguardhome/work # nslookup www.actuallygoodregulations.eu 1.1.1.1
Server: 1.1.1.1
Address: 1.1.1.1:53
** server can't find www.actuallygoodregulations.eu: SERVFAIL
** server can't find www.actuallygoodregulations.eu: SERVFAIL
/opt/adguardhome/work # nslookup www.actuallygoodregulations.eu 8.8.8.8
Server: 8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8:53
** server can't find www.actuallygoodregulations.eu: SERVFAIL
** server can't find www.actuallygoodregulations.eu: SERVFAIL
/opt/adguardhome/work # nslookup www.actuallygoodregulations.eu 9.9.9.9
Server: 9.9.9.9
Address: 9.9.9.9:53
Non-authoritative answer:
www.actuallygoodregulations.eu canonical name = 87dde843d494d012.vercel-dns-017.com
Name: 87dde843d494d012.vercel-dns-017.com
Address: 216.198.79.1
Name: 87dde843d494d012.vercel-dns-017.com
Address: 64.29.17.1
Non-authoritative answer:
www.actuallygoodregulations.eu canonical name = 87dde843d494d012.vercel-dns-017.com - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Traffic
- ISO 8559
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Train_Control_SystemThat’s so false it’s not even funny. I live in Spain and there are a TON of blocked websites.
And this is true for almost all these legislations. They remove power from individuals and companies, while avoiding to limit EU and state power in any meaningful way.
Maybe use the time machine to move out of Franco's Spain?
* start a party to push for legislative changes that resonate with what the people want
* vote for a party that propose to change certain legislation to something more adjacent to what the people want
* people can lobby the government via interest groups or as a collective to influence politicians or if the constitution allows for it try and hold a popular vote on the issue(s)
It came from within the party that pushed for it.
But you can though.
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)
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.
Catch just two more and you can challenge the USB trainer in Viridian City!
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)
Not strongly against it as such, but also not entirely convinced it's needed either.
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.
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.
In reality an oligopoly was stuck in a crappy stalemate and people had only compromised options. Carrying two sets of wires everywhere sucked.
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.
Which is a fine? The industry eventually converged to just a handful of common standards on its own.
You can’t innovate without being able to experiment. Which is only possible if there are actual people using your product. Thinking that a committee of bureaucrats can replace that is silly.
One standard for chargers is the only acceptable outcome and it wouldn't have gotten there without regulation.
What need is there to experiment with chargers? Wire go in, power go through - it's really not that complicated, the only important thing is standardization.
That’s the point, I have no clue. But we might still be stuck with floppy drives with a mindset like that.
Although as a physical connector usb-c is far from perfect. IMHO lighting seemed nicer in some ways.
That seems like a false equivalency to me. It seems quite obvious that storage media have more potential for development than charging wires.
Wire go in - power go through, is literally all they need to do and USB-C does that pretty well.
I'm extremely pro standardisation, but the next revision needs to do a lot better.
And when it comes to USB-C. Sure, it's far from perfect, but it's a great foundation to built upon and improve.
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..
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.
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.
Europe still hasn't caught up to ADA. I don't know any other really good laws that are unique to the US, but I'm sure they exist.
Really? Some examples?
Such a great law.
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.
And when will Americans finally learn that instead of the imperial system of units, the rest of the world uses SI?
My guess would be gallons per flush
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.
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.
If hoovering up my data is bad, make it illegal. Don't wrap it up in niceties and then deflect the blame.
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.
Do Not Track was ignored because there was no legal requirement to. Wikipedia is not the best source, I know, but its first sentence on the "Adoption" section is: "Very few advertising companies actually supported DNT, due to a lack of regulatory or voluntary requirements for its use"
Lack of regulatory requirements. In other words, no government had the smarts or the spine to make it a law. Who is to blame for making the law...? Lawmakers.
"that's on you" is also an absolute cop-out, in my opinion. Lots of things on the internet are illegal, usually for good reason. I don't think I need to list examples. The EU, EU member-states, and other jurisdictions have no problem making horrendous things on the web illegal to host or visit. If data harvesting is bad, explicitly make it illegal.
"The average user would notice he's being tracked" also is the counter-argument to my point - if every site, no matter how banal, has a bar at the bottom with a big blue button that effectively says "yeah whatever go away" then it's ignored. Boy who cried wolf. If this bar only showed up on Meta and Google and Doubleclick ads then maybe it would carry some weight.
I didn't think it was necessary to say, but apparently it is: my criticism of this part of the GDPR is not to invalidate the good work it has done for user rights on the web. Only to note that regulations, no matter how well intentioned (the point of the OP), come with side-effects that were unseen at the time. Don't waste keystrokes defending those unfortunate side effects (while apparently blaming everyone except those with the power to change it) but instead form campaigns and working groups to propose something better and encourage your legislators to adopt it.
Websites could show a small banner that says "hey, we use cookies for targeted advertising; click here to opt in to them" but instead chose to use a full-screen pop-up where you can't even navigate properly if you don't click. Hell, some don't even have an easy to access "Reject all" button—I even wonder if it's legal.
While I admit cookie banners are a side effect of the GDPR, they only came to be because that's what the industry chose. Claiming that the reason Big Tech did not honor DNT is because there was no legal requirement is true but not the full picture; they ignored it because it is against their advertising incentives.
GDPR should be even more radical for sure but none of what they enacted was a mistake.
But that's beside the point. My point (generally) is that what the industry wants is irrelevant. I'm sure many industries would like to pay below minimum wage, or employ children, or deny sick days. It's legislation (and labor unions, but I'm not going down that road right now.) that stops them. Legislators put a stop to all of that because it's bad for people and society beyond that company's bottom line. Governments are the ones who have the tax-collecting, police-enforcing ability and no one else.
Sites abide by the rules as they're read and the precedent of their enforcement. Maybe the only change that needs to be made is an explicit definition of good vs bad cookie banners. And real enforcement of those rules. That's above my pay grade.
But I'd like to go back to my original point: regulations being good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Things that are ultimately good may have annoying effects on the few impacted. Like EV mandates which are great for emissions but deny car enthusiasts their vrooms. Or energy efficient refrigerators which don't have pull-out drawers like American ones did in the 1950s. Or compostable wooden spoons which send shivers down my spine when I put them in my mouth. Often this is a head vs heart distinction, and I accept that.
The GDPR is not an exception to this, and considering the immense power imbalance between the tech giants and the average person, the only counter we really have are legislators who need to take that responsibility seriously.
At work I—unfortunately—cannot install uBlock Origin on some devices and the few times I need to use that device I have the opposite of your experience. Do you live in the EU?
I understand your point but GDPR was not here to ban data harvesting. If anything, I'd call cookie banners a win because it exposes bad websites for what they really are: pieces of garbage riddled with dark patterns trying to force you to consent to give your data by profiting off of your lack of attention. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure the "Reject optional cookies" option is mandated by law. That's why GDPR was successful within the scope it was given.
Thinking it was either pop-up banners or nothing is a false dichotomy.
And again, my whole hypothesis was that a well-intentioned regulation can still fall short or have loopholes which need addressing. An in-depth discussion on the merits of the GDPR was a little beyond my plans to be honest.
Anyways, fun chat!
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.
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.
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.
It had a very significant impact privacy, worker rights and such.
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.
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.