UX nightmares are not the fault of cookie laws, they're the fault of companies that don't want to respect users. If the companies behaved more ethically, there'd have been little impetus to even create such laws.

"The system is perfect; it's the humans that are flawed!"

It's easy to see that websites want people to accept all unnecessary cookies, but are mandated to ask for it. So they'll give one big "Accept everything" button and bury the rest under as many clicks as possible. This is not an issue with the law, nor is it an issue with the users; you know how to make a better UX ? Remove all tracking content. You know how to make it as good as the way the websites owner want ? Make the "Reject all" button front and center.

The UX being bad is a _conscious decision_ by the website owners

The system isn't perfect. But those cookie consent shit that the vast majority of websites peddle? It's directly against the law

The system isn't perfect. But it's better than pure anarchy.

Probably no (human-designed) system will be perfect. In the case of obnoxious GDPR consent popups, though, the main problem is companies (under the direction of humans, obviously) that are doing their utmost to subvert the clear and reasonable intent of the law, because they simply don't want to respect it (or their users). They're a cancer on the internet. I hope to see the day when enforcement is taken more seriously.

>But it's better than pure anarchy.

that's a pretty low bar

Who said unicorns are good? Money =\= value. It's just a proxy, which doesn't always work. You know how you can prevent regulation? Don't be excessive and greedy.

But where are the examples of the valued products in large use? Let's see.. Spotify ok, Mojang hmmmhmmm.... Rovio? Outside of Spotify, what do I use on a daily basis as an American that's a valued EU-based company?

Not going to take sides but Europe does have innovation. It’s just not necessarily commercial or they have been bought out. JetBrains, Minecraft, Python, Linux, HTTP/HTML, ARM, DeepMind.

Linux isn't a good example. Torvalds abandoned Europe a mere five years into Linux, and has lived in the US ever since. For 80% of the development of Linux, he has been in the US, almost a quarter of a century. His home is in the US, he's an American citizen. He has lived in the US as long as he lived in Europe at this point (except he chose to live in the US, he was born in the Europe and left by choice).

Wouldn't really count the UK as part of continental Europe, i see them more as a part of the anglo sphere(US,UK,AUS and NZ). But wouldn't also say programming language can be claimed by a continent because most are global effort or contributions.

The scenario in my head is what if the US decides to put the same kind of sanction/embargos they have put on Russia, Iran and China how well will the EU handle such a economic/technological warfare, can we in the EU continue to function by flipping a switch and have cyber sovereignty. Because as far as i can see the EU tech sector got colonized by US companies, and i wouldn't be surprised if the same happen with India in 10~20 years.

The US won't probably go as far as to enact sanctions against the EU but rather pressure its leaders to support US against Russia and China, like banning Huawei spyware or commonly applying sanctions. Which we should probably do anyway because its in our common interest.

Not going to take sides but none of those are internet companies.

> Outside of Spotify, what do I use on a daily basis as an American that's a valued EU-based company?

ARM Holdings (to be fair they did spend 99% of their life up to this point in the EU) and SAP are two reasonable examples derived from the EU that have products that are used by Americans regularly. ARM was co-founded by two American companies and is now owned by a Japanese company, so that's not exactly a shining independent example for the EU (past or present).

It's not an 'internet' based company, which this article is specifically talking about. German cars are heavily used by Americans, and I have many German appliances, but again that's not what the subject matter is.

ARM and SAP are both Internet companies without question.

ARM wouldn't be relevant at all without the Internet. In practical terms its product is entirely linked to the Internet, specifically the mobile Internet.

ARM is not a website, sure, nor an app. It's as much an Internet company as AWS is. One could pretend AWS could exist in some formulation without the Internet, but that would be silly. The same is true with ARM as it exists today, the Internet made them what they are. If you remove the Internet, which neuters smartphones, ARM all but vanishes; thus, they're plainly an Internet company. You don't have to be strictly software to be an Internet company.

You could then call Nokia and Ericsson Internet companies, but they also existed for purely voice-based services. ARM chips go into all kinds of things like hard drives and microcontrollers that are not Internet based. Yes it's true that ARM has exploded due to cell phones, which in turn heavily rely on Internet-connectivity for their value proposition, but the Apple Newton used an ARM-chip well before 3G.

This article is talking about 'internet-vision'... I don't see how ARM fits into that vision, especially since it effectively predates it. Plus it's now been sold to Softbank at any rate.

>ARM was co-founded by two American companies and is now owned by a Japanese company, so that's not exactly a shining independent example for the EU (past or present).

ARM was founded by two American companies and a British company, Acorn Computers.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

A lot of infrastructure. A lot, industry is not tech. The world is not the US.

The article is specifically talking about internet-based companies, aka "tech". It seems to me you're confirming an absence of them, which to me invalidates your comment of 'who said unicorns are good?', because the absence suggests that the current model isn't working.

It's true the world isn't the US -- can you point to successful internet-based EU companies that are big in both EU and some other part of the world? If so, it would seem a shame that they're not able to compete well in the US given the size of the market and the compatibility in culture/law/trade.

He asked for valued products. Not valued tech products. With the hidden assumption, which I called out, that only products created by tech unicorns are products.

And pithy one-liners are not arguments. OP is specifically asking for examples.

Skype, OVH, Zalando. There are surely others, but, yes, most internet companies are in the US. The question is why? I can think of two reasons: the US is more uniform (one language to start with), so once the business starts to go well it explodes quickly, whereas in Europe it may go well in one country, but expanding to other countries is harder. The other is because it's where the big investments are, so people, also from Europe, go there to get funded, which attracts more investments. It's a positive feedback loop and it's hard to stop it.

> what do I use on a daily basis as an American that's a valued EU-based company?

Booking.com? Adyen? (they're worth more than Stripe)

Pretty short list...

Mojang, Ubisoft, CD Projekt Red

> Don't be excessive and greedy.

Easier said than done if you have a monopoly. Blah, Blah, competition, Something, Something.

Another problem created in Europe by iverregulation is MOSS. EU is a "single market" but with thousands of rules when it comes to taxation. It is very hard for B2C digital services startups to sell on the European market, because you have to charge taxes according to the rules of any of the 27 countries. Of course, this is an easy problem to solve for the behemoths.

It seems a little unfair to single out Europe or the EU for this. If the EU didn't exist, then the situation wouldn't be any better (of course, you can hope that the EU would make the situation better than it is, but that requires greater harmonisation which is non-trivial and some may find unpalatable). And it's not just countries in Europe that require businesses to charge taxes according to the rules of the various countries -- many countries around the world do exactly the same. And as I understand it, differing sales tax across states in the USA can also create headaches. So it doesn't seem to me that this issue is specific to either Europe or the EU.

As for the behemoths being able to solve the problem, there are options for smaller players as well, like using a specialist who handles all the tax issues for you worldwide -- for example Paddle (I'm unaffiliated and have never used them; I'm just aware of their existence).

The US has botched regulation of telecoms compared to the UK/Europe

> That is actually because of regulatory capture in the US [...] nothing to do with free markets.

Regulatory capture has everything to do with free markets and American capitalism. I don't even understand how Americans can use the internet without an overseas VPN.

how can regulatory capture exist without regulators?