Green and digital are the major pillars of the EU vision. Its a genuine and positive vision, certainly distinct from the US/Chinese versions. There is some skepticism that the vision will ever translate to an alternate proposal. Politicians jumping on bandwagons, talking a good talk, distributing some funds in scatter gun fashion and hoping something will stick... In the end the innovation and breakthroughs will come probably more on the green than the digital side. There is very strong engineering tradition whereas digital somehow was always basically outsourced to the US.
Neither sound genuine to me. If anything, they sound like a cover for everything else the politicians want to do.
Think about the results the EU has achieved in digital. They've managed to:
* create pop-ups on almost every website
* screwed over regional pricing so that Bulgarians have to pay the same price as Belgians. Somehow region locks still exist though.
* tried implementing a system where all ISPs had to save all traffic of their users users
* recently the EU adopted a new copyright directive that will force digital platforms to pay money to copyright holders because a user might upload copyrighted content
* implemented a digital VAT system that screwed over microbusinesses, because the politicians couldn't be bothered to implement a minimum threshold (they eventually did... After a few years)
On the green front more has been done. But I'm not quite thrilled that they banned straws and strong vacuum cleaners. Neither do I like that they seem to be trying to make sure that we end up stuck with confusing USB cables.
A few of your points seem right but several are just wrong or misleading. E.g. GDPR is a great tool just maliciously implemented by companies that have an interest to do so - 90% of the banners you see are purposefully designed to be annoying and delivered by a small group of ad networks. The aim is to grind you down and make you just click anything to get rid of them. But it has also given us Google/Facebook takeout and the right to actually delete your accounts.
>E.g. GDPR is a great tool just maliciously implemented by companies that have an interest to do so - 90% of the banners you see are purposefully designed to be annoying and delivered by a small group of ad networks.
But then why does https://europa.eu/ also have this banner? Surely, if this were so easy then the European Union's commission could at least be able to make a website without the banner, no?
And I agree that GDPR isn't all bad, but they had plenty of previous experience to come up with a better system than what we ended up with on the pop-up front. They knew that this would happen, because it happened previously. And yet they did it anyway.
