I would call this the religious zeal response, it's been parroted so many times here that it's become fact, even though this is false.

The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex...

And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible.

For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow."

However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc.

To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!

Right, but there's also the competing religious zealots who are ideologically opposed to regulation... like as a concept.

What you need to realize is that of course companies hate regulations. Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation.

When slavery was outlawed in the US, you can bet your ass that every single bad-faith recreation of slavery was tried. Many of them highly successful, and some taking over 100 years (yes, really!) to be fixed.

What that means is that, just because a company puts up a cookie banner, or says "this law sucks", doesn't mean you should take that to heart. Of course, to them, it sucks, and it's too complicated, and it's all legalese, and la dee da. They would prefer to hire children, okay? And we know that, for a fact, because they did. So just, grain of salt.

Doesn't mean the law is good either, but just know these are the adversarial forces here.