It’s definitely made browsing the open web a worse experience. There should be global opt in/out.

There was, the ad agencies either ignored it, or worse used it as an additional signal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

Companies made browsing the web a bad experience, not GDPR.

This sentiment is so widespread I'm starting to wonder if it's astroturfed by anti-GDPR lobbying.

Yeah that’s me, I’m funded by the anti-GDPR lobby. Still waiting on my check.

You could merely be convinced by one. That is sadly an unpaid position though.

But more seriously, this discussion has come up so many times on this site, that I could instantly find myself talking about it a handful of times at least:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669399 (go up-parent a few times if more context is needed)

And that doesn't even go into whether sites actually need to ask for cookie consent at all if they aren't collecting user data outside of functional necessity (they don't).

Plenty of high-school logic level libertarians got convinced by corporation lobbying to undue regulation too

I'm not a libertarian. Just don't make laws that obviously lead to every website having useless warning labels.

> There should be global opt in/out.

They should not be. That there is people willing to give their data to big corporations and foreign countries by extension puts everybody at risk. It is a matter of national security and it should not be allowed, no opt in option.

Woof. How about we let users decide, thanks.

> Woof. How about we let users decide, thanks.

Are they deciding with full understanding of what does it mean to accept such terms or are they just "accepting" to stop being bothered with pop ups.

The industry loves to give people "a choice" when they know that the average user can be coerced to accept anything.

That is not a real choice, and it should be illegal. User profiling is a crime and should be treated as such.