I assume you mean the AI related stuff?
Finally!
Even EU government websites had annoying giant cookie banners.
Yet, some how the vast majority of HN comments defend the cookie banners saying if you don't do anything "bad" then you don't need the banners.
Cookies are a client-side technology.
Why does the government need to be involved?
Blocking cookies locally doesn't allow you to easily discriminate between tracking and functional cookies. And even if the browser had a UI for accepting or rejecting each cookie, they're not named such that a normal user could figure out which are important for not breaking the website, and which are just for tracking purposes.
By passing a law that says "website providers must disambiguate" this situation can be improved.
the issue were the 100s of tracking cookies and that websites would use dark patterns or simply not offer a "no to all" button at all (which is against the law, btw.)
Most websites do. not. need. cookies.
It's all about tracking and surveillance to show you different prices on airbnb and booking.com to maximise their profits.
https://noyb.eu/en/project/cookie-banners (edit: link)
That isn't how people work. The law was poorly written and even more poorly enforced. Attempts at "compliance" made the web browsing experience worse.
Definitely a failure of enforcement, but let's not pretend that was good faith compliance from operators either
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
Because that made more sense than the cookie banner ever did.
Edit: it looks like there is a legal alternative now: Global Privacy Control.
This is a very odd framing, because the actual reason from quotes in the article is that the EU is acutely feeling the pain of having no big tech companies, due in part to burdensome privacy regulations.
The pressure isn't really from big tech, it's from feeling poor and setting themselves up as irrelevant consumers of an economy permeated by AI.
A large part is due to their approach to startup investing and chronic undercapitalization. GDPR is coming up 10 years now and the worries about it were overblown. What hasn't budged is Europe is very fiscally conservative on technology. Unless it's coming from their big corporations it's very hard to get funding. Everyone wants the same thing, a sure bet.
GDPR showed that once you are a ten-billion dollar company, your compliance team can manage GDPR enough to enter the market. For a startup, starting in the EU or entering the EU early is still extremely difficult because the burdens do not scale linearly with size.
This means that yes, US tech giants can sell into the EU, but the EU will never get their own domestic tech giants because they simply cannot get off the ground there.
If that is your goal, OK, that's a choice, but then you can't say "oh GDPR fears were overblown". They caused exactly the problems people were predicting, and that's what EU leadership is now trying to change.
Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monumental case against Meta yesterday).
What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die. But not by forcing the hand - that's bad for everyone, especially the enterpreuer / hacker types on this site
While they are at it, I hope they do it to the other big techs too.
Being a "hacker type" (whatever that means) does not equate to being complacent to these companies abusing their economic power.
Their track record is pretty good.
Prior to 2020, FTC would have had a much stronger case. But too little too late.
That happened a decade ago. Users dropped from Facebook like flies and moved to Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg's response was to buy Instagram. The Obama DOJ waved through what was obviously a blatantly illegal merger.
Likewise, Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition. In fact, Google controlled so much of the M&A market that YCombinator (the company that runs this forum) complained in an amicus brief that they were basically being turned into Google's farm league.
So long as companies can be bought and sold to larger competitors, no tech company will ever become irrelevant. They'll just acquire and rebrand. The only way to stop this is with the appropriate application of legal force.
European Commission plans “digital omnibus” package to simplify its tech laws
EDIT: And you cannot share information gained by permitted collection unless EXPLICIT permission to share is granted.
[1] Eg: it's not sufficient to disclose this in equivocal text buried in 25k lines of EULA text.
I'd like to see for myself, as I don't consider moving the consent method from the webpage to the browser settings "watering down" — it's the opposite.
https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2025/11/EU-Kommission-...
https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2025/11/EU-Kommission-...
The official website mentions these documents, but for some reason doesn't let you view them, saying "It will be possible to request access to this document or download it within 48 hours".
https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-register/detail?...
https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-register/detail?...
But it's not enough - they need to completely repeal the DSA, AI Act, ePrivacy Directive, and Cybersecurity Act at least. And also focus on unifying the environment throughout the EU - no more exit taxes, no need for notaries and in-person verbal agreements, etc.
There's just so much red tape and bureaucracy it's incredible. You can't hire or pay payroll taxes across the EU (without the hire relocating) - that's a huge disadvantage compared to the USA before you even get into the different language requirements.
With the advancement of AI being used to commit fraud through chat, video, and audio calls I think we're at the precipice of needing to in-person verbal agreements again.
And I thought the harmonization of markets in the EU would have reduced the red tape but some industries are built on it and will complain quite vocally if their MP makes any move on it.
The bizarre thing is now they advertise how fast they can read! Like it serves no purpose other than giving notaries and lawyers a slice of all transactions.
Europe is full of backwards stuff like this - where the establishment interests are so strong, it cannot be adapted for modern times. From blocking CRISPR and gene editing crops (while allowing the less controlled but older technology of radiation treatment), to blocking self-driving cars.
Great to see this finally. It’s obviously the way it should have been implemented from the beginning.
We still see this technically myopic approach with things like age verification; it’s insane to ask websites to collect Gov ID to age verify kids (or prove adulthood for porn), rather than having an OS feature that can do so in a privacy-preserving way. Now these sites have a copy of your ID! You know they are going to get hacked and leak it!
(Parents should opt their kids phones into “kid mode” and this would block age-sensitive content. The law just needs to mandate that this mode is respected by sites/apps.)
Good kid mode[0].
[0] https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/retro-telephone-31174
An OS feature is also a terrible option - remember when South Korean banks forced the country to use ActiveX and Internet Explorer?
The government should offer some open digital ID service where you can verify yourself with 2FA online, after registering your device and setting credentials when you get your ID card + residence registration in person.
Europe's cookie nightmare is crumbling. EC wants preference at browser level
AndrewKemendo•1h ago
Put together and those two basically undo the entire concept of privacy as it’s trivially easy to target someone from a large enough “anonymous” set (there is no anonymous data, there only exists data that’s not labeled with an ID yet)