Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement

I'm surprised that most of the comments here are siding with Europe blindly?

Am I the only one who assumes by default that European regulation will be heavy-handed and ill conceived?

What is bad about heavy handed regulation to protect citizens?

A good example of how this can end up with negative outcomes is the cookie directive, which is how we ended up with cookie consent popovers on every website that does absolutely nothing to prevent tracking and has only amounted to making lives more frustrating in the EU and abroad.

It was a decade too late and written by people who were incredibly out of touch with the actual problem. The GDPR is a bit better, but it's still a far bigger nuisance for regular European citizens than the companies that still largely unhindered track and profile the same.

Cookie consent popovers were the deliberate decisions of company to create the worst possible compliance. A much simpler one could have been to stop tracking users especially when it is not their primary business.

Newer regulations also mandate that "reject all cookies" should be a one click action but surprisingly compliance is low. Once again, the enemy of the customer here is the company, not the eu regulation.

I don’t believe that every website has colluded to give themselves a horrible user experience in some kind of mass protest against the GDPR. My guess is that companies are acting in their interests, which is exactly what I expect them to do and if the EU is not capable of figuring out what that will look like then it is a valid criticism of their ability to make regulations