Companies have spent billions on cookie banner compliance only to endlessly annoy users with no material improvement to their privacy, but this unsightly blight is still with us (and the rest of the internet!). All because the EU has no mechanism for self-correcting its legislative failures, even with years of evidence in the bag. The bureaucratic maze almost guarantees that all the noble intentions eventually find a dead end in which to get stuck. What a waste.
It's this example that all enthusiasm for European tech legislation should be set against. The fact that cookie banners still exist. And that the bureaucratic drag they have created across Europe (and the rest of the world) is ludicrously disproportionate to whatever theoretical value these awful overlays actually provide.
It makes it hard to cheer for even much-needed antitrust action, like the Digital Markets Act. Because if the EU can screw up something as basic as cookie banners this bad, and prove so incapable and uninterested in re-calibrating its approach, what hope is there for the thornier issues?
What made me think of cookie banners today was the discussion about Europe's new AI legislation. Which even the architect of the law is now having second thoughts about. Because like many modern European laws, it's a vague, posturing, and suffocating mess that's way too specific about things it fails to prove the ability to understand.
It's also just an embarrassing illustration of Europe's third-tier status in technology. So little of the core tech innovation that's driving the future, in AI or otherwise, is happening in Europe. And when it does happen there, it's usually just incubation, which then heads for America or elsewhere as soon as its ready to make a real impact on the world.
Europe is in desperate need for a radical rethink on how it legislates tech. The amount of squandered potential from smart, capable entrepreneurs on the old continent is tragic. It needn't be like this. But if you want different outcomes, you have to start doing different things.