On the other hand, the EU has finally brought telco to their knees. We had the situation where as e.g. a T-Mobile Germany customer, you'd pay exorbitant roaming fees to use mobile internet or to call on the T-Mobile Netherlands network. It's still expensive, but getting better by the year, thanks to the EU intervening in such cases.

But telephony was invented over 100 years ago - and given the USA completey screwed up telecoms deregulation its a case in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king.

This one I agree with, but telco is basically an oligopoly anyway (created by a necesitty).

There needs to be a regulation, because it's not a free market. You cannot just created a new operator because everything is licensed.

Yep the EU's track record on laws on tech is not exactly good is it.

Cookie law - probably cost jobs as vast resources where pissed against the wall to implement this.

Every website mentioning privacy has had a great impact on privacy awareness world wide.

It is a brilliant law, but many people still don't understand why so. It has probably done most for privacy than anything else I can think of.

What vast resources? How hard it is to pop up a link to your cookie/privacy policy?

You had to do far more than just change your privacy policy and this was for more than some trivial site with 200 pages or so.

Try implementing it across a global 500 publisher with maybe 60+ major internet property's many of which are built from 3 or 4 CMS's over a decade and it quickly adds up.

Just finding all the pages on a large site to apply the changes to is a non trivial problem.