Just so you know: GDPR has (mostly) nothing to do with those cookie banners. It’s a very broad text that doesn’t go into specifics like that.

What you’re seeing is a result of the 2002 E-Privacy directive that has been reinterpreted by data privacy authorities in light of the new definition of consent brought by the GDPR.

Basically, since 2002, websites are required to ask users for consent before depositing cookies. The issue was that there was no definition of what this consent meant. What the GDPR did is simply to define the concept of consent as a free expression of will that must come from a positive act (i.e. it must be explicit rather than implicit).

The GDPR was supposed to come out with a sister regulation called the E-Privacy regulation, but due to intense lobbying that text was buried. Local data protection authorities in Europe then decided to reinterpret that old directive in light of the GDPR to fill the gap.

All in all, blame the lobbyists, not the GDPR

Not sure whether it means something else in English, but in french a vernissage is the first opening of an art exhibition

Hey, I’ll let you know that I’m a judgmental asshole and I happen to be french, but I don’t hate the world, only the parts that aren’t french

I remember the “They hate us for our freedom” line from the bush-era. I was still a kid at the time and I clearly remember asking my parents about it because it seemed like such a weird thing to say.

Of course, as a french kid, this was also the time when I kept seeing Americans on TV pouring wine in the sewers and calling us surrender monkeys because we refused to join the Irak war, so that might have influenced me a bit

I can’t see any context where those two sentences wouldn’t be awful

The UD absolutely could, but Microsoft couldn’t without facing massive legal trouble. That is, if the US legal system follows through and actually enforces EU court orders.

Regardless, unless specifically being forced to do so by the US, Microsoft wouldn’t have any reason to leave a billions-dollars market

It happens every year. Basically, ever since media started publishing statistics on which city had the most burnt cars on new years eve, some people made it a challenge of which city will “win”