It doesn’t matter what the law is about, what matters are the actual consequences and the impact that the law has had. So far it has had quite a negative impact for users. I really don’t see how this was a win for anyone.
The consequences only highlight the problem. We're currently in the first stage in a transition towards allowing the end user to express their wishes about tracking which then companies need to respect.
It only shows how disrespectful almost all companies are by attempting to shape the end users opinion on this law by attacking them with dark patterns.
If France is now expecting companies to equalize the opt-in and the opt-out behavior, they're essentially attacking these dark patterns, which is very welcome by almost all end users.
I hope that there will come a point in time when I can go into the settings of my browser, tell it what the default behavior (answer) should be and possibly even express interests in certain ad categories to whitelist them, like "biking". It would be a granular "Do Not Track" option which must be respected by the website.
You have any arguments beyond ad hominem?
This law exposes a very serious problem: even sites like Oracle's news blog or Volvo's corporate site, or British Airways's profile pages are selling your data to hundreds of advertisers.
I wonder if you're playing Devil's advocate or you really are defending this.. They could skip the "burden" users face by just not using so many dang tracking cookies. If you want information about how your customers use the site, or what their interests are, you can just _ask_ and try to solicit feedback explicitly. Most of the people will likely decline, but that _should be_ their choice to do so. And providing feedback _should be_ opt-in, not opt-OUT.
