It's almost like there are multiple people and groups in EU administration, with different goals and priorities.

Looks like they listen more to engineers, except when doing that can touch their power. Not that surprising: powerful corrupt politicians are of the same kind, no matter their nationality.

Any good cartoonist out there that would make the EU version of this masterpiece?

https://i.imgur.com/D93heEo.jpg

I think if they listened to the engineers they wouldn't have mandated USB-C and GDPR

Good news they didn't in those cases then, hopefully they will this time.

It all seems pretty consistent to me. The EU commission wants more power for itself and less autonomy for companies, particularly tech giants, having failed to create any of its own.

I think the people who support things like mandating USB-C, forcing open the App Store, and GDPR are misguided at best. These are significant transfers of power from the (mostly) organic and consensual realm of individuals and businesses to the coercive realm of state force. You can always buy an android phone (with USB-C) and use GrapheneOS, F-droid, Tutanota, Brave Search, Odysee, Mastodon, Matrix, etc. to get most of what you want without asking unaccountable bureaucracies to enforce your will on everyone else by the threat of violence.

I have a special hatred for GDPR for contributing to balkanization of the internet, and for the annoying cookie warnings that sometimes breaks sites when you disable cookies at the browser level. The only way GDPR actually improves my privacy is by forcing me to use a VPN to access some sites.

Actually you can use it to take down personal information, sort of like DMCA is used for copyrighted content.

Pretty much any website threatened with GDPR will remove your photos/phone number/email/whatever, they're not worth the fine. You could then still report them tbh (it has to be reported to whatever enforcement agency in the country it's hosted in, though, which only exist in the EU and are a pain to deal with).

>and for the annoying cookie warnings

These are from companies who are too lazy to properly comply with the GDPR, or worse, plainly illegal. It's not the fault of the GDPR that many companies choose not to be compliant. (The national regulators should absolutely clamp down harder on these non-compliant cookie popups)

When you make a law, you are responsible for the consequences of that law. It's like when the British colonial authorities inadvertently incentivized the breading of cobras, and how modern drug warriors push users to more dangerous substances. You are legislating reality, not a fantasy world where you have total control.