What really bothers me is the law's original design got hamstrung when governments realized it would subvert their own site analytics, and we ended up with the

What really bothers me is the law's original design got hamstrung when governments realized it would subvert their own site analytics, and we ended up with the quite-empty-but-mandatory dialog informing users that a site does a thing that is pretty fundamental web technology (not quite as fundamental as "Transmits data using the HTTP protocol", but pretty close)---instead of scrubbing the whole initiative or replacing it with a Europe-wide education initiative ("The EU presents: browsing and you"). Maybe regulation would work better if there weren't such a disconnect between what lawmakers think people want and the way the technology works.