I don't know where on earth you picked up this conspiracy theory but it's not.

If you'd been following this whole mess you'd know it's just a typical EU nonsense legislation that no-one knows how to implement and the UK is once again implementing it too harshly in law but giving it absolutely no teeth by creating a practically powerless and massively underfunded enforcement vehicle while our EU brethren quietly ignore it.

No big conspiracy, just your bog standard bureaucratic incompetence from the EU.

No conspiracy intended! I know this started as the result of some-scaremongering-or-other on the Continent, as usual.

What I'm saying is that it's clear to everyone involved that the authorities (EU or UK or whatever) will never be able to enforce this law except for the largest targets, in the same way as they'll never go after anyone coupling their OS and browser except if it's as big as Microsoft.

> Translation: we don't want to sue you, this law is to go after Facebook and Google.

Actually, it's to go after anyone they don't like. I suspect that Facebook and Google are better equiped to handle "go after" than you are.

No, they may not want to go after you today, mostly because they probably don't know that you exist but get their attention and things may change.

If shopping cart-type cookies are excluded, then I'd say this law favors FB et al.

How so? From what I understand, these regulations make the Like button illegal -- I believe that was the main target of this legislation, together with similar efforts from Google aimed at tracking users across websites.

So then it's not so simple. Some commerce wins, some lose.