The alternative is much worse, which is having zero say in tracking cookies. I'll take a banner on every single website to have more control of that.

I really don't see the issue. If you really find them annoying, use ublock with a proper cookie banner filter or something like that

You don't need a cookie banner if you aren't doing anything shady. Using cookies (or other such mechanisms) does not require information or consent popups when they're necessary to make the product/service work for technical reason - the canonical example being session cookies.

The corollary here being, you only need consent popups if you're doing something shady but not strictly illegal. They're not meant to be annoying - they're there because it's illegal to do shady shit without the user agreeing to it, and "agreeing" in the EU means "informed consent". So you have to inform, and then get consent.

It's all pretty reasonable. But of course, people doing shady shit really don't want the users to understand it and risk them not consenting - and they especially hate having to ask in the first place. The industry settled on a "malicious compliance" approach to GDPR - show popups that, as much as they can get away with it, maximize the chance of people consenting to make the popup go away, make the "informed" part as opaque as possible, and generally make this thing super annoying - and then tell people it's all EU's fault, hoping enough Europeans will buy it and the public pressure will make EU undo GDPR.

I have yet to see a company that prioritized quality over profits, unless forced to by regulation.

But EU citizens want good AI models, not EU approved models, and people can use VPN. Because regulatory process kills fast moving business and whatever is rubber stamped by EU bureaucracts and compliance-industrial complex law firms sucking out money by selling snake oil compliance services is already few years behind.

Would you buy a three years old car as a new?

What "unreliability" are you talking about in terms of American tech businesses?

> For some situations it's safer to do it in the EU despite the regulations

The EU has zero tech companies that rival FAANG et al here in the US. Zero. Because of it's (well-intentioned but harmful) business regulations.

I have a feeling you're projecting your dissatisfaction with election results more than anything tangible...

Telling lies basically.

The rules require tracking outputs, which open-weight models cannot do. So I'm wondering if open-weight models have separate rules or this effectively bans releasing such models.