> The bad thing is that the companies are willing to bombard us with the worst possible cookie banners, in order to monetize our visits.

The EU's own government websites [1] are littered with the same cookie banners. They want the visitor data just as bad as everyone else.

> Maybe the next EU regulation

We don't need anymore EU regulations seeing how bad and thoughtless they already are.

[1] https://european-union.europa.eu/

It’s bad because they’re not enforcing it. Have the law and enforce it or don’t have the law.

The problem with GDPR and cookie banners is that GDPR allows the cookie banners to be worded so indirectly. "To improve our service we share collected information with 5723 partners..."

If the law would force them to say "Do you want Larry Ellison to get richer by looking through your webcam? [Yes] [No]" it would be a good law.

Taxation is only part of the picture. Quoting from https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/13/uncle-sucker/:

In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech...

Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.