In theory. Reality is quite far from that, as anyone on the ground can attest.

There is zero chance, for instance, that anyone in Greece or Portugal or Ireland will be impacted, judicially, by this decision for several years. That’s better than before. But it’s far from e.g. a U.S. federal court ruling in California’s impact in New York, or a French court’s ruling in Paris in Marseille.

That's a charitable phrasing. As per Protocol 2 on the functioning of the European Union, article 8 [2]:

The Court of Justice of the European Union shall have jurisdiction in actions on grounds of infringement of the principle of subsidiarity by a legislative act, brought in accordance with the rules laid down in Article 263 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union by Member States

What Poland did was declare nationally (government, and then a national court) that the EC was infringing on its sovereignty (principle of subsidiarity). But as the above text says, national governments don't have jurisdiction when it comes to matters questioning the primacy of European law.

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...

This is the essence of a divergence of theory and practice. The text says one thing. In reality, something else plays out.

I think the text will prevail. But that delay (and uncertainty) is precisely what I’m talking about. And it happens everywhere, with active regulatory arbitrage an all-but-admitted strategy of a significant section of the SME space.

I don't think this is true. The impact will be felt immediately all over Europe, in fact it is already in the news here and people are already discussing dropping GA from websites:

https://www.nu.nl/tech/6178229/google-analytics-binnenkort-m...

From the article:

> This is a very detailed and sound decision. The bottom line is: Companies can't use US cloud services in Europe anymore. It has now been 1.5 years since the Court of Justice confirmed this a second time, so it is more than time that the law is also enforced.

This article is addressing a specific case which follows from a previous judgement (known as Schrems II) which determined that Facebook could not transfer data from Ireland to the US under the US 'Privacy Shield' framework, as it no longer meets the GDPR's adequacy requirement due to CLOUD Act.

This finding by the Austrian court just reaffirms that the Schrems judgement also applies to Google Analytics.

As the article mentions, this is the first of 101 cases ongoing brought by Schrems, and I expect them all to end in more or less the same outcome.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2020/6520...

The court has not arbitrarily declared GA illegal, it just follows what the GDPR mandates - and came to the (quite obvious) conclusion that GA is not compatible with the GDPR.

Consequently it is illegal everywhere where the GDPR applies. This doesn't mean that there are immediate consequences for those who use GA on their websites in any other country, but it is very likely that other EU countries' courts will decide the same way.

So that means the current status is that's precedent a court in another EU country would strongly consider but technically could come to a different decision on and in either case the losing party has the option of appealing to the EU level.

It seems Google was sued in Austria and they have found it to violate the GDPR so yes, it applies to the whole EU.

GDPR is a set of minimum standards that are common between countries in EU, some have even more drastic laws.

In the article it points out that there are similar suits across the EU by the same organization, so it's not too unlikely that there will be similar reults in some or all of the cases.