GDPR is absolutely not the shining beacon of success. Let's review at some glaring, obvious and 100%-lets-make-this-law-shite points:

1. Application and enforcement: GDPR is 100% arbitrarily enforced, it is a "trust us, we could do no harm, trust us" law, that is extremely well suited to adding other such "trust us" laws.

2. Absolutely ridiculous overreach: on a technical level, GDPR is braindead. It applies ridiculous, stupid and unnecessary restrictions for no purpose.

3. You just added an obligatory "lol accept this or GTFO" thing to all sites.

1. OK, so all laws that aren't consistently enforced are useless. What about copyright?

2. "For no purpose" - you know the purpose, you just pretend it has none because you don't like it.

3. No, that's explicitly forbidden.

3. No, you cannot serve any EU customers if there is not option to "opt out" of any unnecessary processing

The reality however, after GDPR was implemented, is 95% of the time GTFO or click accept.

Wait till mid 2019 when EU countries will actually start enforcing it. Unofficially there is a change period so probably no one will really be touched by it in the first year.

...which means these sites are not GDPR compliant and might be fined heavily in future.

In theory, very true.

I've noticed quite a few US sites, particularly some large news orgs, have been going the "accept this or leave" route, and some are going the "accept this or click on the entrance to our insane maze of links that will confuse you until you give up"

They are non-compliant, guess we'll see what happens.

> No, you cannot serve any EU customers if there is not option to "opt out"

Josh buddy. By chance, have you spent any time at all on the internet using so-called "GDPR compliant" sites?

> and now they want to mess with something as fundamental as a hyperlink.

Unless I'm missing something, basic hyperlinking seems to be excluded from the scope of the new directive, and it is instead targeting services that reproduce the publication more substantially.

Recital 33:

> This protection [granted to press publications] does not extend to acts of hyperlinking.

Article 11, paragraph 2a:

> The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall not extend to mere hyperlinks which are accompanied by individual words.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

And now it is covered also in GDPR banner graffiti…

Cookie law is still relevant. The only difference is that now companies can actually get penalties for not complying with those rules. Previously it wasn't really enforced. Without consent no 3rd party scripts and content that can track visitor should be loaded, and once the change period of 1 year passes, a lot of sites ignoring this will start receiving well deserved penalties.

I'm having trouble figuring out what world you live in. The GDPR has accomplished nearly nothing at huge cost. Maybe the upsides will look better a few years down the line with some enforcement history, but this GDPR Compliance Coordinator strongly doubts it.

> GDPR is a shining beacon of success

I can't browse the internet with cookies disabled anymore because of all these horrible banners taking up the screen to take my consent.

For people who care about privacy, it's made the experience worse, not better, I even send a DNT header and still get this.

I am blocked from accessing certain sites, so now I have to route my connections through countries outside of the US, this is not a success for people like me.

If they had involved technical people, we wouldn't see such horrible implementations.