I’m pretty skeptical about how much fundamental change is possible on this issue. So long as we give consumers a choice, the overwhelming evidence is that most people dgaf about their data, and are willing to trade it away.

This is a totally free exchange. Even when you plant the choice in front of users as an obnoxious and intrusive accept-cookies prompt, they’ll happily click Accept All even for sketchy websites (let alone something like Gmail). So you end up wasting everyone’s time for little benefit.

A common response to this is to mull heavy-handed centralized government controls, like how China regulates its internet giants. But this would be a decisive move away from the entire idea of a decentralized internet. People pushing such legislation often retort that it’s possible to pick off the internet giants while leaving smaller operators alone, but this seems like a forlorn hope. Google and Meta already signalled that they are not concerned about EU data laws, because they have so much internal data, and the regulations could even entrench their dominance by preventing other players from catching up.