It is only this degree of malice and incompetence that can give rise to something like the CCC.

Yeah it does feel like much tech competence that sprouts in Germany is either sequestered off and penned in, and/or leaves the country.

There is a kind of naiveté, also at EU level, where people think that once it's a law, bad actors will just fold.

They minds are somehow unable to comprehend that only the good actors will fold and only bad actors will be left.

Other examples are: Firearms possession, supply chain law regarding human rights and child labor.

I was really excited for GDPR until I realized Europe had no intention of actually enforcing it :-(

Actually, southern europe seems to have understood that it can be quite a good business fining US megacorps billions and billions. Northern european countries do very little except symbolic wrist slapping.

Sure, but there were other provisions like machine-readability of exported data, etc. that could have been really helpful. I should be able to do a one-click export of my Spotify playlists and favourites (the music I like is personal info in my view) in to Qobuz, for instance.

"The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided"

https://gdpr-library.com/article/20