Exactly, and this law is used everyday against European companies that tries to grab too much data. The US is the epitome of the surveillance society on par with China (look at how Apple wad sending push notification, or how phone companies just share your location data with the world). Here in Europe we fight by making sure that the data cannot be collected in the first place.

> The cookie banners are a bad outcome for sure, but GDPR does not mandate them

Not only that but the terrible banners you get are very often not compliant with GDPR.

> specific paragraphs of GDPR

GDPR doesn't target American tech companies, that's the DMA. Essentially, the framing is there are companies that are "gatekeepers" and then everyone else. The criteria for gatekeepers are theoretically objective, but they were written with a specific set of companies in mind. As a consequence, the designated companies except TikTok just so happen to be based in the US. Further, the rules were written such that EU firms like Spotify are not eligible.

Also, Vodafone somehow is not considered a gatekeeper in any relevant digital market.

Anyway, no judgement. We are in a time of rising protectionism. This may be good for Europe. But the DMA clearly targeted a set of West Coast US companies and it's doing what it was intended to do.

I do wish they would modify GDPR to only apply to people e.g. physically in Europe or similar. It really does make the Web worse for billions of people who are not EU nationals and derive absolutely no benefits from the banners.

While they're regulating browsers and plugs, could they make browser makers ship EU versions of their browsers that show the popups, while the rest of us save tons of clicks? EU nationals could install EU versions of their favorite browsers and the rest of us would just use the stock versions.