Ironically, nothing about GDPR itself is clear and understandable, as is evidenced by the fact that everyone keeps discovering years after implementation that some random country disagrees on their interpretation of it.
The only people who misunderstand GDPR are people whose salaries depend on misunderstanding GDPR. The requirements are quite clear, advertiser just don't like them and are trying to avoid complying with them.
Yeah? So nobody in the EU is using Google Fonts, AWS, GCP, Azure, CloudFlare, Akamai or any other US provider then, given that this ruling is based on the fact that loading the consent settings screen from the shared domain requires "sharing" an IP address? Nobody in the EU runs an online business reliant on advertising? Of course they are.
I'm convinced pro-GDPR views are always ideological in nature. It's impossible to read GDPR or related case law from the perspective of trying to comply with it and not be disgusted. Every single requirement is vague and subjective - words like "appropriate", "necessary", "reasonable", "proportionate" etc aren't just a part of this law, they are the entire essence of it. And even the occasional term that looks precise often has totally unintuitive definitions, like the way they define large random numbers as "personally identifiable" even though there's no database that links these numbers to any actual personal identity.
Even this announcement about a new ruling is a fog of confusion. Why is asking users for consent, a key piece of GDPR compliance previously, suddenly not OK? Why is this being phrased as "freeing users from consent spam"?
This sort of thing wrecks the EU in the eyes of people actually building things. It makes it seem that this is a part of the world without rule of law of any kind. You can invest hundreds of millions into GDPR compliance and years later discover it was all in vain, without any warning whatsoever. You're being constantly trolled in courts by random academics and "civil liberties" organizations who don't seem to care about actual civil liberties issues like mandatory medical interventions but who define advertising cookies as a grave threat. Dealing with the EU gets ever more painful and if this keeps up, people there are gonna discover they're being denied services or simply charged more as a "GDPR litigation premium". And then they'll be stuck, because the home grown EU software industry is stillborn.
> Every single requirement is vague and subjective - words like "appropriate", "necessary", "reasonable", "proportionate"
This is how laws work and why the "law as code" people are not going to succeed. The US leaves this to the enforcement stage, e.g. many tests in US law for ascertaining enforcement include things like the reasonable person test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person). Proportionality is a well enshrined standard in EU law in particular, and cuts both ways - it's why this ruling is not the maximum fine out the gate.
Or let's take this clause from the DMCA (regarding what is considered obsolete and therefore the library may format shift): "For purposes of this subsection, a format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or device necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no
longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace."
