Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Instead of making meaningful change, the EU proceeded to make almost every European website 10x worse with egregious cookie nag screens filled with dark patterns.

They trained users to accept all advertising cookies, while being massive hypocrites (a lot of EU bureaucratic websites ship user data to Google via GA or GTM).

The EU is one of the biggest threats to online freedom. Threatening to ban memes, egregious copyright laws to serve Hollywood interests, cookie nag screens and US media excluding EU IPs altogether because EU law is insane.

Access to media within the EU has never been worse. A significant portion of US news media exclude all EU traffic due to regulation.



> Instead of making meaningful change,

Meaningful change: the ways that web sites track you are now disclosed and require your explicit consent.

> the EU proceeded to make almost every European website 10x worse with egregious cookie nag screens filled with dark patterns.

It is the web sites that have chosen to make your experience worse. The blame lies with them.


Does that not make you wonder what it is that they want to track which is so incompatible with those regulations that they'd rather ban the traffic?


Tracking is a choice. uBlock Origin is a free download. Geoblocking is not a choice.

EU citizens are worse off only having access to insular media with one viewpoint. If you're German and a significant amount of foreign media is either blocked or scorned, you end up enabling giant frauds like Wirecard.

Germany's homegrown DW had fawning coverage of the fraud, calling it remarkable and a "weapon against poverty". [1] [2]

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/whats-behind-the-remarkable-rise-of-ge...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/is-fintech-the-latest-weapon-in-the-fi...


For what it's worth DW is not allowed to broadcast in Germany and therefore relatively unknown amongst Germans.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: