This is what I mean: apparently even tech people still don't know the basics of GDPR.

If it were common knowledge that cookie walls are not required for any normal website operation or statistics keeping, but only a thing required for invasive tracking, then any website introducing one would face questions and media attention rather than it being the norm. The law requires cookie walls exactly nowhere, it requires to ask for consent before doing something you have no valid reason for doing.

There are 5 defined valid reasons, including "it's in the subject's interest" and "it's in our legitimate interest" and stuff like that. O-n-l-y if you can't shove it under any of those, then you need to fall back to politely asking the subject you want to track. Every cookie wall is in this category. We really shouldn't be accepting this, but try educating half a billion people speaking thirty languages who have better things to do. It's not even well-known among the tech community, which continuously surprises me. Maybe we need to outlaw consent that is not part of a bigger contract (so a random website visit, not like research or so), maybe we need to have big website owners set better examples... I don't know.

But anyway I guess I was more interested in the new battery law rather than hosting my fourtieth hacker news gdpr misconceptions session, as I've not yet read the actual legal text of the former.

Maybe it’s the fault of the EU for making the GDPR so complicated?

All a private company - Apple - had to do was create a 5 line rule change and add a setting to iOS and it the entire ad tracking industry including Facebook announced billions in losses.

Well Apple could enforce a single settings to drive all apps. The equivalent would be EU mandating by law a centralised privacy setting on browsers to state we only allow necessary cookies. That might come but some companies would have been kicking and screaming even more.