I wonder if the EU will someday figure out a patch for this "Deteriorate everyone's user experience in a way that is technically compliant and blame the EU" behavioural exploit...
All of these hissy fits Google and Apple are throwing are just making me wanting to use them less and less and I'm doing my best to explain how tech companies are doing malicious compliance to others.
So Google is forced to take competitor to account or will be pushed out of the market ?
No? Better to complain and do nothing positive? Welcome to EU Parliment.
They also buy up the competition before it gets a chance as is the way now.
For the past 50-ish years the West convinced itself that government should not build, and as a result we're suffering from a slow collapse of basic infrastructures. Meanwhile, in China and the Gulf, government kept building and the world's center of gravity steadily keeps moving eastwards.
And they're not doing that. They are only making it harder for existing services to exist, in order to change the situation, and in order to make money for themselves. But they're not helping in the sense of building anything.
To expand upon the silly comment a bit, not sure about this particular initiative, but to me it very much feels like something that should be configurable at browser level, instead of half-assed dark-pattern-filled JS dialogs: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
Oh, and please ignore that this surveillance apparatus is now being used to expell people, all of which already has resulted in many missing people, and even some deaths. Any historical parallels are entirely coincidental.
I know that sounds like it comes from "it will never work", but that's how active directory, office file format, etc ... got opened, and in a case more similar to here that's how windows n and decoupling of media and internet component from windows internals happened.
The issue is, yes, it takes time.
Another issue, purely PR, is that yes the EU gets attacked repeatedly by people trying to match "respect the law of the market or leave" with "the EU tax US companies because they can't compete".
The important proviso is that the penalties need to (on some non-geological timescale) get high enough that the offender is no longer capable of operating. That could mean the fines reach $500 billion, or it could mean the company is barred from operating in the EU, or it could mean people get arrested and assets are seized. But unless the penalties become crippling, it won't matter. It needs to reach a point where the downsides of noncompliance are actually greater than the benefits.
But unlike the story some on HN and in the US like to think, US tech companies don't ever get there except rare exception, they know the game.