I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.
So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
The internet is global. A person sitting in Palo Alto, a shack in a rural village in Southeast Asia, etc. doesn't care about German law and is, in all but a few exceptional cases, beyond its reach in the real world.
Let's say some company or "entrepreneur" sitting in an office in Palo Alto or in his house in the Philippines wants to sell a SaaS app they vibe coded in a week.
They use AI to create a marketing email and list of targets. They blast it out and it lands in the inbox of some dude in Germany.
Do you really think the company or individual is going to ever face any consequences for sending the guy an email?
The bottom line is that in the real world, some random "entrepreneur" or SME sending an unsolicited "Hey software guy, I have a service you might be interested in" email to somebody in Germany isn't ever going to cause them trouble.
I will stop here, the whole back and forth feels unproductive
But that also doesn't really matter to this discussion - the law existing provides evidence that not wanting to receive unsolicited corporate communication is not a fringe opinion.
The problem is way more people are convinced (or just hoping, or just setting off an automated system that is even less discriminating than that) that I am interested in their product than I have inclination to check their pitch out, especially given their to-date 0% success rate.
If I don't know them, no, they may not.
The best you will ever be able to do is (try to) ignore unwanted communication.
The more common scenario is that I waste more of their time than my own.
Not once in my entire 40 years on this planet has a single ad or cold outreach been welcome. Every single one is full of lies and partial information that is vastly inferior to me going out and researching products that I want.
I don't care what you think I'll be interested in. I might be, but you're too biased for me to trust you to give me reliable information about the product. Leave me alone.
Otherwise you’re just stating your preferences to internet strangers who have no idea who you are. What else don’t you like, pineapple on pizza?
Sure, let's entertain the possibility that you're one of the not-very-intelligent people who thinks ads are there to help them, and you like having ads shown to you. That's great for you, have at it! If you want to spend your money on shit you don't need from companies that spend their money on advertising instead of producing quality products, that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean it's okay to ram ads into the face of everyone else who doesn't want ads. And outside of the self-serving Hacker News bubble where you wrongly assume anything profitable must also be popular, most people don't like ads.
To borrow your analogy--sure, me not liking pineapple on pizza is just a preference. But advertising is like if they offer free pizza on the condition that it has pineapple on it, and if I pick the pineapple off they have someone follow me around and try to put the pineapple back on the pizza as I put it in my mouth, and when I decide I'm going to pay for pizza to avoid the pineapple guy, they still put pineapple on the pizza, and people follow me around trying to put pineapple on the pizza that's in my lunchbox and sneak into my house and put pineapple on the pizza in my fridge. And at some point you have to admit that while not liking pineapple on pizza is just my preference, maybe my preference is valid and you pineapple on pizza people need to leave me the fuck alone.
For the record, I like pineapple on pizza.
But I get a log of "we noticed your website isn't ranking in Google" spam which is not.
And there's a bit of truth to that, for new products - people don't know about it yet. But it quickly goes from awareness to persuasion, then lies, and finally mindless repetition of a logo and tagline.
The endgame of ads is not information flow, it is programming the emotions and memory of the "audience."