David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

And you end up making...

the web much worse.

And this is the thing we always got to remember when we think about legislation, when we think about monopoly fights is you may not like how things look today and you may want to do something about it, but you may also make it worse.

The good intentions behind the GDPR in Europe currently has amounted to what?

Cookie banners that everyone on the Internet hates, that helps no one do anything better, anything more efficient, that saves no privacy in any way, shape or form, has been a complete boondoggle that has only enriched lawyers and accountants and...

It's a monument to good intentions leading straight to hell.

And the Europe is actually world class in good intentions leading straight to hell.

Just on a human scale, try to imagine how many hours every day are wasted clicking that away.

And how much harm we've done to the web as a platform that people enjoy because of them.

The internet is ugly in part because of cookie banners.

Cookie banners were supposed to save us from advertisement.

And advertisement can make the web ugly.

There's plenty of examples of that.

But cookie banners made the entire internet ugly in one fell swoop.

And that's a complete tragedy.

But what's even worse, and this is why I call it out as a monument to everything the EU gets wrong, is that we have known this for a decade.

No one...

anywhere who's serious, believes that cookie banners does anything good for anyone, yet we've been unable to get rid of it.

There's this one piece of legislation that's now, I think, 10 or 12 years old.

It's a complete failure on every conceivable metric.