> makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people

Which it is?

I am from the EU and I don't see what this law has accomplished apart from making the WWW worse, especially on mobile.

I remember back when Opera was a paid browser, last century, it already have options to accept all cookies, refuse them, or set fine-grained preferences per website. No need for handling it at the website level if the client can do it.

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lucideer 4 days ago | parent [-]

> making the WWW worse

You can argue that the law might not have improved things (at least not as much as intended), but nothing about this law has made the WWW worse. If you believe that, you've fallen for the concerted efforts of the advertising industry spreading misinformation about who's idea the annoying consent popups were & (like this website) perpetuating the myth that they're a legal requirement.

None of the new annoyances on the modern web that you're thinking about are mandated by EU law. It benefits the ad industry massively to scapegoat the EU for these annoyances.

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Al-Khwarizmi 4 days ago | parent [-]

The objetive, observable outcome is that before the law, websites don't have cookie banners. Since the law passed, they do. And they make the user lose time, and make navigation much more cumbersome, sometimes even impossible (not even 5 minutes ago, I had to go back on my phone because a newspaper article went into an endless loop after accepting the cookie banner).

It doesn't matter much what happened behind the scenes to cause that outcome. From a black-box perspective, it could be that

(a) the EU mandated the cookie banners, (b) the EU mandated to provide cookie settings in some generic form, and websites decided to use banners because it's easier, more lucrative, or even to put people against the EU, in spite of having other options that were better for the user. (c) the EU mandated a different thing and the annoying banners don't even comply with the law.

No matter what the case is, the fact is that the EU made the WWW worse with the law. Either due to an outright harmful law, or to a well-intentioned law with too many loopholes, or to a good law but lack of enforcement. Doesn't matter much for the end user. When you make laws that affect people's daily life, good intentions aren't enough.

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lucideer 4 days ago | parent [-]

The EU law is good for consumers & bad for advertising companies. In response to this, advertising companies have made the web a significantly worse user experience.

You can reasonably argue that if the EU had not taken action to reduce advertising companies' ability to abuse customer rights, then advertising companies would not have retaliated, & therefore the web would be a less annoying experience. You cannot reasonably argue though that this is some isolated one-sided situation where ad companies are devoid of culpability.

Your entire comment essentially amounts to ignoring an elephant in the room to sell a narrative that one "side" bears 100% of responsibility for the outcome.

	▲	Al-Khwarizmi 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not that I ignore the responsibility of advertising companies. It's just that I take for granted that they are bad. They are an adversarial actor, and they aren't accountable to me. My governments (including the EU) are. If your government passes some badly-designed regulations that cause a rat infestation, you can be as angry at the rats as you want, but that won't be very useful. If you want things to actually change, it's the government you need to complain against, not the rats.