First, why does the EU leadership refuse to learn from falling behind the US economically and technologically, most starkly with AI recently, and their failures in regulating the Internet, most annoyingly the cookie law? And why aren't you, the EU citizen, more annoyed by it? I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.
enedil · 2026-06-28 15:13:02 UTC
> most annoying the cookie law
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
olejorgenb · 2026-06-28 15:33:07 UTC
And either 80% of banners are not respecting the law, or the law managed to omit mandating making it as easy to reject as accept... Rejecting usually require you to enter into settings and sometimes click "reject" for every individual partner(!)
vikaveri · 2026-06-28 15:58:12 UTC
That was the case in the beginning, for a while. Now I rarely see even ones where I have to click Settings and Reject all, usually it's just Accept all and Accept only essential. No dark patterns just two equally visible buttons. Often also just "We use only essential cookies" and OK button because they don't have 1138 partners they want to sell your data to
GTP · 2026-06-28 16:34:39 UTC
And in the latter case, they could even not put any banner at all and still be compliant. The GDPR requires consent only for tracking.
olejorgenb · 2026-06-29 10:32:02 UTC
I also see more of these, but I'd say still around half require more click for "reject non-essential"
retired · 2026-06-28 20:54:35 UTC
The largest Dutch tech website doesn’t adhere to the cookie law. They ever reported about websites not adhering to the law while not adhering to the law themselves.
EdiX · 2026-06-28 16:53:41 UTC
"Cookie banners are malicious compliance" is starting to wear thin as an excuse. GDPR went into law in 2018, almost ten years ago and for almost as long websites have been "maliciously complying". If you don't don anything about it at some point it's not malicious anymore, it's just how the law is meant to be interpreted.
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
graemep · 2026-06-28 15:13:33 UTC
Denmark have been pushing for chat control for a long time.
The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.
blfr · 2026-06-28 15:29:01 UTC
Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?
sph · 2026-06-28 15:33:24 UTC
I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves.
And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
microtonal · 2026-06-28 15:52:21 UTC
How would members of the EP benefit from Chat Control?
freehorse · 2026-06-28 16:22:33 UTC
Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically.
I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
wqaatwt · 2026-06-28 16:31:08 UTC
Some sort of perverse inclinations of controlling other people’s lives and knowing what’s “better” for them. Delusional and narcissistic people seem to be generally significantly over represented in politics (another demographic is useful idiots, put those two together and well..)
sph · 2026-06-28 16:46:57 UTC
They would be exempt, along with military and intelligence personnel. So they can enact mass surveillance, stop any form of dissent before it has a chance to grow, while themselves remaining above the law.
I'm completely serious here; the former minister of law was beaten as a child and it informs his whole world view.
graemep · 2026-06-28 16:56:43 UTC
That can make a lot of sense. People do tent to put too much value on their own experience - there is a tendency to think your experiences are normal.
wqaatwt · 2026-06-28 16:27:16 UTC
Ar they, though? The established longterm consensus is pretty reasonable in the EU, it’s not self evident that things have been going in the right direction on the whole in recent years.
mantas · 2026-06-28 16:55:26 UTC
Is it?
The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.
And there're lots and lots of small things like those.
monssooon · 2026-06-28 19:05:15 UTC
Denmark is a world leading producer of windmills
mantas · 2026-06-28 20:53:28 UTC
Meanwhile local solar industry is loosing to Chinese at fast pace. Batteries industry ain’t looking good either.
monssooon · 2026-06-29 06:36:25 UTC
The point was the conflict of interest. But yes what you said could maybe even make the conflict even more pronounced
mantas · 2026-06-29 07:15:51 UTC
IMO it's conflict of interest of some short-sighted naive idealists vs people who want to get stuff done.
For example, solar. Shit ton of euromoneys is poured into subsidies. But those subsidies are not geofenced. Thus vast majority of people go for chinese stuff. It could have been much better to subsidise locally produced components only. Then price would be +/- the same.
Now chinese components are dirt cheap with all the subsidies. I myself went for chinese components, because break-even period was like 5 vs 10 years. I'll just pihole the inverter from calling home once I figure out how to get some statistics without the manufacturer's app.
I guess some people decided it's better to get 2-3x more solar installed power ASAP rather than prop up the local solar industry.
wqaatwt · 2026-06-28 20:20:41 UTC
Yeah, I meant mostly the 80s and 90s (i.e. the period when the Western European countries were able to keep up with the US or ever narrow the gap). Since then they have just been coasting on top of that.
mantas · 2026-06-28 20:51:28 UTC
EU became a thing in 1993. And soon after Europe could not keep up with US of A anymore. Even though USSR was gone, EU expanded and so on. Coincidence?
basisword · 2026-06-28 15:13:50 UTC
European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out. The implementation could of course be better but the real issue is the scummy web devs choosing to make it as annoying as possible instead of taking the more sensible decision to not have 150 trackers on every page.
>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
microgpt · 2026-06-28 15:22:00 UTC
Website operators hate these cookies popups because they make their website more annoying and make me more likely to press the back button and click on a different website. As it should be. This incentivizes them to stop tracking me.
dminik · 2026-06-28 15:27:25 UTC
Why then do they make the most annoying, user-hostile dark pattern cookie banners they can come up with? No, website operators hate that they have to either stop spamming thousands of tracker scripts or put up a banner.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
dgellow · 2026-06-28 15:50:48 UTC
Most of them don’t care and just integrate whatever is the most common cookie banner widget because their legal team asked them to
anonzzzies · 2026-06-28 15:58:51 UTC
Yeah, that's more the point; in discussions with clients I very often get asked how far we can go without any consent. Most companies want all the privacy ignoring stuff and they don't want to tell their users about it.
microgpt · 2026-06-28 16:28:30 UTC
Realistically you won't be caught analyzing server-side logs of things the client is doing anyway, even if you don't follow GDPR rules with those logs. But they want Google Analytics, right?
sensanaty · 2026-06-28 16:47:41 UTC
The solution to that one is pretty simple, simply don't collect information you don't need, and you can avoid the banner altogether! Github manages to not have banners, it's not because of magic.
goobatrooba · 2026-06-28 17:36:43 UTC
There is no obligation to put a banner of you don't sell your users' data to third parties. The law is very clear that your don't need it for period technical cookies, so it's really always and every time solely about tracking and advertisement money.
microgpt · 2026-06-28 18:23:00 UTC
You do need it for analytics though, or any other non-essential purpose.
You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.
ajsnigrutin · 2026-06-28 15:47:38 UTC
99% of the people just click accept and go through.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
sensanaty · 2026-06-28 16:45:20 UTC
Cookies have literally nothing to do with GDPR or the ePrivacy directive. It is mentioned I think twice total in both documents as an example of how user data is persisted and tracked across domains, but ultimately the mechanism is irrelevant.
GDPR legally prohibits tracking in general, not cookies specifically. Advertisers use fingerprinting more than cookies these days already, even if browsers removed cookie support altogether it wouldn't change anything.
grayhatter · 2026-06-28 16:28:07 UTC
So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?
I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?
The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.
No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.
Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.
I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
vouwfietsman · 2026-06-28 20:07:35 UTC
> So you like the law, but don't like how it didn't actually solve the problem it was trying to solve?
(Not the person you replied to)
I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it.
The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening.
Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?
That is the law at work.
Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked.
If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.
AnthonyMouse · 2026-06-28 20:32:27 UTC
> Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?
> That is the law at work.
The problem is that's not what anybody, including the users, want. Nobody cares that browsers have cookies as an implementation detail. It's a ridiculous thing to use as the basis of a privacy rule. Does the user care that the site uses cookies to implement a shopping cart feature? Does the user not care that the site is tracking them without cookies using device fingerprinting? Cookies were never the problem.
On top of that, they were the thing the users already had control over. Browsers allow you to delete or reject cookies, provide private browsing modes that don't submit them, etc.
Meanwhile the things that would actually be useful, like prohibiting services from requiring the user to provide a phone number (a de facto cross-service cross-device tracking ID) in order use the service, or requiring device attestation (which uniquely identifies the device), are left unaddressed.
vouwfietsman · 2026-06-29 05:03:08 UTC
I am eagerly awaiting your grassroots campaign to define legislation that would tackle such uses, and also eagerly awaiting it backfiring because of malicious compliance.
AnthonyMouse · 2026-06-29 09:20:46 UTC
Malicious compliance is a result of incompetent drafting. It's common because incompetent drafting is common, case in point GDPR. It's definitely possible to screw it up less than that -- there are many laws that nobody complains about.
You pass a law prohibiting any entity from conditioning the use of their service on the user providing them with a phone number. Even services that actually use SMS or voice calls are required to provide an alternative like email or the web with no reduction in functionality and for no additional cost.
You pass a law stating that any device which is sold or leased to anyone who takes physical possession of it cannot contain a private key the customer is unable to both read and extricate at no cost.
What does malicious compliance look like there? Anyone can give them an email instead of a phone number and if that doesn't work they're in violation. Remote attestation is the only reason for devices to come from the factory containing an inaccessible private key, which is thereby prohibited and unable to be used as a tracking ID.
noisem4ker · 2026-06-29 05:54:27 UTC
Cookies are not the basis of the law, which is about tracking in general, abstracted from the exact means and implementation details.
AnthonyMouse · 2026-06-29 08:23:54 UTC
The law contains some ridiculous language about storing data on the user's device, which applies to cookies in particular even though that category in general makes no coherent sense, because the thing that should matter is if you can identify the user/device, not whether you used something in the shape of a cookie to do it.
AnthonyMouse · 2026-06-28 20:23:26 UTC
> I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
You want the winner to be the side with more expensive lawyers who use psychological manipulation techniques against a jury?
In general juries are the finders of fact. They decide what happened, e.g. who is lying. Judges decide the law, i.e. whether the thing the jury says they did is a violation of the law.
What you're asking for is to have the jury decide what the law is. There are a lot of problems with that, but one of the big ones is that jury determinations don't have to follow precedent and, unless you want judges ultimately deciding it anyway, can't really be appealed. Which would result in zillions of spurious lawsuits against innocent people because a small percentage of them would win big at random.
drnick1 · 2026-06-28 22:44:24 UTC
> European here. I like the cookie law. It's made it clear to people how much we're being tracked and I can choose to opt out.
Opting out of cookies does not mean no tracking. Tracking companies moved away from cookies a decade ago and now fingerprint the browser through JS in very subtle ways.
msm_ · 2026-06-28 23:00:42 UTC
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without consent.
msm_ · 2026-06-28 23:01:15 UTC
And the banners are not about cookies specifically, they are about tracking. It's illegal to track people without a lawful reason (and one of the valid reasons is user consent).
drnick1 · 2026-06-28 23:18:50 UTC
What are you supposed to learn from the banner anyway? It's just an additional annoyance.
You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical, and only allowing for very limited and coarse measurement of client-side user interaction.
kalleboo · 2026-06-29 00:27:13 UTC
> The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical
As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).
drnick1 · 2026-06-29 21:14:49 UTC
But the GDPR does not achieve anything in practice. You get annoying cookie/tracking banners that you are effectively forced to accept in order to use the website, and companies keep collecting data. They promise not to misuse the data, but we all know that they still will. Enforcement is very difficult because it is impossible to audit every tech firm out there, so you are essentially relying on leaks and whistleblowers for the truth to come out. A complete ban on data collection not directly provided by the user would have been more effective overall, even though you still face the same enforcement issue.
dgellow · 2026-06-28 15:14:58 UTC
The population doesn’t support chat control. The European Parliament rejected the chat control proposal earlier this year. Now it seems that the European Parliament president is trying to bypass that
monssooon · 2026-06-28 19:11:15 UTC
Well put
bluecalm · 2026-06-28 15:15:05 UTC
It's not like we can do anything.
We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list.
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
basisword · 2026-06-28 15:18:18 UTC
>> We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues
This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
bluecalm · 2026-06-28 17:46:52 UTC
There are too many levels of indirection. At least in some countries you can vote on a person representing your town/area. This is one level of indirection less and allows people who aren't just chosen party members to win and then they have incentives to help the region.
In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.
Argonaut998 · 2026-06-28 17:55:41 UTC
The problem with the EU is that there are many levels of abstraction, and the more links in a chain the more susceptible to corruption it is.
This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.
blfr · 2026-06-28 15:18:19 UTC
Yeah, we can: I am from Poland and precisely through this mechanism our MEPs/delegates/nominates know that supporting this would be a disaster for their political group right here back home regardless of direct voting.
josmar · 2026-06-28 15:31:37 UTC
Only Switzerland has a true democracy
dgellow · 2026-06-28 15:47:43 UTC
We also have representatives. We call it semi-direct democratic system. There is no such thing as a „true democracy“, it’s a set of principles
remolueoend · 2026-06-28 20:38:00 UTC
Agreed, but there's always the possibility of a referendum or even an initiative, to oversteer a decision of the representatives, given enough supporters.
ezst · 2026-06-28 15:23:33 UTC
> falling behind the US economically and technologically
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
gib444 · 2026-06-28 15:31:26 UTC
Why does any country or bloc need to learn lessons about "falling behind" the US?
Why is that the yard stick?
I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump
Dear lord
spacebanana7 · 2026-06-28 16:37:22 UTC
A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind.
Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.
thrance · 2026-06-28 22:40:38 UTC
We French still get higher life expectancy, more free time, free education and healthcare... GDP per Capita is a terrible metric.
Not claiming that everything's sunshine and rainbows over here, but at least we aren't ruled by a proto fascist pedo actively ridding the country of its democratic institutions and destroying public service after public service to give more wealth to his pedo friends.
spacebanana7 · 2026-06-29 05:40:01 UTC
Most of the GDP per capita divergence has happened since 2008. My same comment could’ve been written when Biden was president.
iamnothere · 2026-06-28 15:38:28 UTC
Denmark’s recent reasonableness is somewhat of a historical aberration if you look at their history. The migrant crisis (and the failure of governments to address it) has stirred up some ugly things there.
tokai · 2026-06-28 15:53:23 UTC
What do you mean the migrant crisis stirred up things? The anti immigration position in danish politics has been a winning position since the mid 00's.
iamnothere · 2026-06-28 16:01:38 UTC
As the crisis has worsened across Europe, Denmark started unbelievably intrusive AI-enabled mass surveillance of welfare recipients (almost 15% of the population), dangerous infrastructure which could be applied to the population as a whole. And I’d argue that fears over migrant-driven crime are what allowed Denmark’s politicians to push for Chat Control in the first place.
tokai · 2026-06-28 16:13:03 UTC
Yeah no I don't buy that, and have never heard that angle before. Surveillance in Denmark is much older than that. Since the personal ID number was rolled out in 1968 its been one long process of integrating public systems with each other to surveil and control. Surveillance of welfare recipients started getting serious in the 00's too. The migrant crisis drove polices like the confiscations of jewelry from foreigners, and public funded commercials in the middle east telling people to stay away.
Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
tough · 2026-06-28 16:18:38 UTC
I'd say the AI powered aspects of it is whats troubling.
We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people?
Sounds like you would know more on this, then, I had heard that there was a link between Chat Control and migration. I was also unfamiliar with Denmark’s long history of surveillance, as I’d literally never heard of this being an issue there until recently—but I do not live there. Thank you for the correction.
Edit: this in no way should be read to condone Denmark’s position here.
Gareth321 · 2026-06-28 16:54:22 UTC
Dane here, I don't think there is much of a link. The government is usually pragmatic about security, and has long leaned into technology to achieve it.
sph · 2026-06-28 18:30:50 UTC
What is funny is that it has been pushed by the social democrats. See also what Labour have been doing in UK.
Whatever we call centre-left today we would have placed much further to right a couple decades ago. At this point even the US Democrats are more progressive than our EU "liberal" parties.
lifty · 2026-06-28 20:01:54 UTC
The whole left vs right is a useless caricature. And it’s especially meaningless when comparing ideologies across country borders. Better talk in terms of policies.
A1kmm · 2026-06-28 22:32:43 UTC
I think it's a more useful analysis to add a second dimension than to try to project everything onto 'left' and 'right' (in the style of the .
Axis 1 - civil & political rights: In favour of broad social & political rights (down) -> In favour of few social and political rights a.k.a. authoritarianism (up)
Axis 2 - economy: In favour of social responsibility / society ensuring people's needs are met (in the sense of 'from each according to ability, and to each according to need') (left) -> In favour of individual responsibility and a laissez faire economic freedoms (right).
On this 2d view, Social Democrats are nominally lower left, while Chat Control is an authoritarian policy (i.e. appealing to anyone on the top half of the coordinate system), so it would run counter to their nominal values.
Note that there is a significant number of the economic left who are nominally authoritarian (see for example Stalinist / Maoists), and likewise for the right so it doesn't make sense to project that as a left/right thing.
iamnothere · 2026-06-28 23:07:28 UTC
That helps slightly, and this version is often favored by libertarians, but I prefer the “8 values” or 8 dimension test that also looks at diplomatic, technological, and religious dimensions. I think I’ve also seen a 9 dimension version.
A multifactor values-based approach better maps niche positions and explains why there are often irreconcilable disagreements among large blocs that are otherwise compatible. For instance, there will always be recurring tensions between progressives and leftcoms despite their neighboring positions on the 4-quadrant political compass. And right-wing secular monarchists don’t really get along with theocrats either.
petre · 2026-06-28 20:51:22 UTC
They saw Sweeden and freaked out, Denmark being already a nanny state.
wolvoleo · 2026-06-28 22:54:48 UTC
Yeah they are really racist, sorry but I have no other way of putting it. They even have a law where they can evict and destroy a building when there's "too many" non-western immigrants living there. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/18/denmark-ghetto...
Hungary is often called out as a black sheep but Denmark is a wolf in sheep's clothes.
m4nu3l · 2026-06-28 15:44:07 UTC
The education system has failed in the EU, but in a different way than it has in the US.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech.
The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
9dev · 2026-06-28 15:48:16 UTC
Of all things to criticise, you pick out the one ruling that eventually lead to a consolidation of chargers? Really? I haven't ever met a single person who wasn't grateful of being able to have one cable for all their devices.
m4nu3l · 2026-06-28 15:56:23 UTC
This is exactly what I'm talking about. A short-term view of the world, progress and technology.
All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.
The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.
It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
9dev · 2026-06-28 16:07:14 UTC
> All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation.
I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!
It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.
> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe
Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
m4nu3l · 2026-06-28 16:13:10 UTC
> I don't have this particular problem, so it doesn't exist!
No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.
> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.
GTP · 2026-06-28 16:47:32 UTC
You might have a point. But, at the same time, AFAIK the only manufacturer that complained about USB-C (and, coincidentally, making the exact same argument as you're making) was Apple. And they definitely weren't interested in making the lightning connector an industry standard. Quite the opposite.
m4nu3l · 2026-06-28 16:56:19 UTC
It doesn't really matter to me, because even if that's true for Apple (or it was at the time), it still means other companies can't test new technologies. They might as well be OK with that, but it still means that consumers won't get new standards.
The first attempt at enforcing such a standard in the EU was made with mini-USB.
It failed to become a regulation (fortunately), but I have no reason to believe USB-C is different, and no better standards would have been tried by companies if they were allowed to do so.
GTP · 2026-06-28 18:02:37 UTC
On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand. It's a compromise and, for the time being, I'm happy with this. As another commenter noted, if we feel the need for a new standard the law can be changed in the future. I concede that, depending on the future's situation, this could be difficult to do. But, without such law we wouldn't have had a standard to begin with.
m4nu3l · 2026-06-28 18:17:47 UTC
> On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand
I don't want a state-dictated standard like this. What you're saying is that because some people want iPhones and they want them with USB-C, everyone else must forgo the possibility of having a better type of connetor until "we" (Is it the majority? I don't even think the majority uses iPhones in Europe) feel like having a new one (at which point the progress has been delayed anyway and you'll also get the initial problem again).
I find the premise quite capricious.
skocznymroczny · 2026-06-28 20:50:42 UTC
That's not true. You are allowed to have a prioprietary/custom connector, you just have to provide USB-C option as a fallback.
Comments
Second, what's up with Denmmark pushing for it here? They're usually very reasonable.
Also, the least consequential even ignoring often stated fact that cookie banners are malicious compliance. I care much less about cookie banners than about the ads, and for both of I have uBlock origin filters. So, what to be angry about exactly?
I have a different hypothesis for why the GDPR exists: it is to create a market for EU based compliance companies.
The American view of the EU is very much a grass is greener one. They see the things that are better than in the US but not the things that are worse.
And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.
I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.
https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...
The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.
And there're lots and lots of small things like those.
For example, solar. Shit ton of euromoneys is poured into subsidies. But those subsidies are not geofenced. Thus vast majority of people go for chinese stuff. It could have been much better to subsidise locally produced components only. Then price would be +/- the same.
Now chinese components are dirt cheap with all the subsidies. I myself went for chinese components, because break-even period was like 5 vs 10 years. I'll just pihole the inverter from calling home once I figure out how to get some statistics without the manufacturer's app.
I guess some people decided it's better to get 2-3x more solar installed power ASAP rather than prop up the local solar industry.
>> I see a lot of pro-EU content on this site when they're terrible on both tech and entrepreneurship.
Life is bigger than tech or entrepreneurship. In the 00's I dreamed of moving to the US. That's changed, especially over the last decade. If I was offered a huge salary tomorrow to work in the US I would turn it down.
They found out that they can offload blame on the EU instead and so have chosen to make the web as annoying as possible.
You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.
This could be solved on the client side, by requiring all devices with browsers sold in EU to have separate cookie jars per domain and by default those cookies would be deleted on window/tab close. If you wanted to stay logged in to a site, you'd click a button next to the url bar that says "keep cookies for this domain", and be done.
> This could be solved on the client side
GDPR legally prohibits tracking in general, not cookies specifically. Advertisers use fingerprinting more than cookies these days already, even if browsers removed cookie support altogether it wouldn't change anything.
I assume you're pretty well read up on matters of privacy, right? So you have a better awareness and understanding. But do you believe the average person does? Or would you assume that the average person has either been trained to ignore the banner, automatically consent to more invasive tracking, or is generally more confused about why the banner exists, or what it does?
The cookie consent law is the dumbest application of an attempt to improve privacy. It's made the internet worse, and is being used to train people into consenting to giving away their privacy without thinking... because: "clicking accept is what you have to do to use the page" -- every normal person casually browsing any site.
No implementation for cookie based consent can be done correctly.
Personally, I'd love to see a law that makes any/all dark patterns a crime, and empowers state prosecutors via grand jury to bring charges for them against both the company, and individual authors of the specific commits as jointly responsible. I don't want statutory laws, I want a trial jury to look at it, and decide if any technological measure, pattern, tactic, procedure, design, or measurement was used to encourage one decision over the other instead of a fair choice.
I don't want a set of rules that given enough funding any company is able to win as a negative sum game. I want a jury, not a trailing clause, to decide if the company is clearly acting in good faith or worthy of apocalyptic fines.
(Not the person you replied to)
I'm not sure where all of this is coming from, the law is actually extremely obvious and useful: you want to track people, they have to be informed, and have to consent. The law says nothing about how, and the way it was implemented was entirely up to the corporations discretion, which of course opted for the most malicious terrible way to do it, but they did it.
The purpose of the law was that people should be informed about cookies being installed and consent to that happening.
Do you feel like people are now aware that cookies are being installed, more so than before the banner? Do people understand that they are consenting to this?
That is the law at work.
Everything above and beyond that is nice to have, and I'm sure the world would be better for it, but without the EU, people probably wouldn't even know what cookies were, let alone understand (or have control over) how they are being tracked.
If that's not a net positive in a world where net-negatives happen every week, I don't know.
> That is the law at work.
The problem is that's not what anybody, including the users, want. Nobody cares that browsers have cookies as an implementation detail. It's a ridiculous thing to use as the basis of a privacy rule. Does the user care that the site uses cookies to implement a shopping cart feature? Does the user not care that the site is tracking them without cookies using device fingerprinting? Cookies were never the problem.
On top of that, they were the thing the users already had control over. Browsers allow you to delete or reject cookies, provide private browsing modes that don't submit them, etc.
Meanwhile the things that would actually be useful, like prohibiting services from requiring the user to provide a phone number (a de facto cross-service cross-device tracking ID) in order use the service, or requiring device attestation (which uniquely identifies the device), are left unaddressed.
You pass a law prohibiting any entity from conditioning the use of their service on the user providing them with a phone number. Even services that actually use SMS or voice calls are required to provide an alternative like email or the web with no reduction in functionality and for no additional cost.
You pass a law stating that any device which is sold or leased to anyone who takes physical possession of it cannot contain a private key the customer is unable to both read and extricate at no cost.
What does malicious compliance look like there? Anyone can give them an email instead of a phone number and if that doesn't work they're in violation. Remote attestation is the only reason for devices to come from the factory containing an inaccessible private key, which is thereby prohibited and unable to be used as a tracking ID.
You want the winner to be the side with more expensive lawyers who use psychological manipulation techniques against a jury?
In general juries are the finders of fact. They decide what happened, e.g. who is lying. Judges decide the law, i.e. whether the thing the jury says they did is a violation of the law.
What you're asking for is to have the jury decide what the law is. There are a lot of problems with that, but one of the big ones is that jury determinations don't have to follow precedent and, unless you want judges ultimately deciding it anyway, can't really be appealed. Which would result in zillions of spurious lawsuits against innocent people because a small percentage of them would win big at random.
Opting out of cookies does not mean no tracking. Tracking companies moved away from cookies a decade ago and now fingerprint the browser through JS in very subtle ways.
You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical, and only allowing for very limited and coarse measurement of client-side user interaction.
As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).
There is just nothing you can do really in that system other than pursue career in politics which is a no-go for most people for obvious reasons.
This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.
In "standard" party democracy there is just nothing that can be done. Calling it democracy as in rule of the people is a disgrace.
This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.
Are you even human? Do you really believe what you say? Doesn't it come across as absurd, from everything that happened to the US since the Snowden revelations, the Patriot Act, spiraling into fascism, a first time attacking science and democracy, a second time to install oligarchs, traitors, corrupt and incompetents to run the state, with the result of tanking your real economy (on every metric that's not related to AI), burning down your soft power, burning bridges with every ally, losing the war against Iran, and causing a generational talent exodus out of the US?
Oh yeah, by no means am I blindly defending "the EU leadership", but some reality check is much needed.
Why is that the yard stick?
I certainly don't spend all day dreaming of F150s, McMansions, the psychopaths leading silicon valley, 9 lane highways, US style PE, and world-class fascist politicians such as Trump
Dear lord
Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.
Not claiming that everything's sunshine and rainbows over here, but at least we aren't ruled by a proto fascist pedo actively ridding the country of its democratic institutions and destroying public service after public service to give more wealth to his pedo friends.
Internally chat control and migration are never talked about together. Chat control has no leverage on migration in Denmark. Its not a factor that would change anything. It's all about international treaties making it impossible to send people out of the country forcefully. That's the policy the migrant crisis really ignited.
We know how trustable ai outputs are, and now govts' are ready to let the AI's control their people?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-po...
Edit: this in no way should be read to condone Denmark’s position here.
Whatever we call centre-left today we would have placed much further to right a couple decades ago. At this point even the US Democrats are more progressive than our EU "liberal" parties.
Axis 1 - civil & political rights: In favour of broad social & political rights (down) -> In favour of few social and political rights a.k.a. authoritarianism (up) Axis 2 - economy: In favour of social responsibility / society ensuring people's needs are met (in the sense of 'from each according to ability, and to each according to need') (left) -> In favour of individual responsibility and a laissez faire economic freedoms (right).
On this 2d view, Social Democrats are nominally lower left, while Chat Control is an authoritarian policy (i.e. appealing to anyone on the top half of the coordinate system), so it would run counter to their nominal values.
Note that there is a significant number of the economic left who are nominally authoritarian (see for example Stalinist / Maoists), and likewise for the right so it doesn't make sense to project that as a left/right thing.
A multifactor values-based approach better maps niche positions and explains why there are often irreconcilable disagreements among large blocs that are otherwise compatible. For instance, there will always be recurring tensions between progressives and leftcoms despite their neighboring positions on the 4-quadrant political compass. And right-wing secular monarchists don’t really get along with theocrats either.
Hungary is often called out as a black sheep but Denmark is a wolf in sheep's clothes.
I realised this when people thought mandating the USB-C connections was a good idea because "it is the best standard". I didn't think the mandated connector was a huge deal per se, but it made it clear to me that there is a flawed thought process behind EU regulations. And this is a big deal.
Many things are not really understood in the EU. The majority don't seem to understand free speech. The EU has an article about free speech that clearly states there is no free speech, but people point to it when they claim there is.
All my devices supported USB-C before the EU regulation. But if I wanted to buy a device with a new type of connector, I should have been able to. This is how the USB-C came to be and how any new standard in hardware happens. New technologies are made and just sold, and if they are proven to be superior to others in the market, they often become standards.
The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe, but if this discovery process is blocked, we will be stuck with it forever, which, of course, will also constrain the design and engineering of devices in other ways.
It's the same fundamental flawed thought process that has made the EU reliant on the US for a lot of services.
I don't have this particular problem so it doesn't exist!
It did exist for huge amounts of people. At the time, many manufacturers had proprietary plugs and would still have them if it weren't for this decision.
> The USB-C standard is not the best standard that can exist from now to the end of the universe
Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
No, what I said is that you could find devices with USB-C in all the categories that are now regulated. This means it was pretty easy to find devices like that if you really valued USB-C. Of course, if you wanted an iPhone but you liked USB-C, you would have had a problem. A problem that is much less worse than blocking progress.
> Which is why the law can be simply amended as soon as such a standard emerges. If the industry figures out something better than USB-C, pressure will build on the council to do so. This is nothing but a straw man.
You totally ignored what I wrote, or you didn't understand it. No standard can emerge if you can't test it on the market. You can have a bureaucrat choose the next one from some proposal. It's not the same.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...
It failed to become a regulation (fortunately), but I have no reason to believe USB-C is different, and no better standards would have been tried by companies if they were allowed to do so.
I don't want a state-dictated standard like this. What you're saying is that because some people want iPhones and they want them with USB-C, everyone else must forgo the possibility of having a better type of connetor until "we" (Is it the majority? I don't even think the majority uses iPhones in Europe) feel like having a new one (at which point the progress has been delayed anyway and you'll also get the initial problem again). I find the premise quite capricious.