[carmen_sandiego]

I don't think you're right at all. The US is the dominant online market. China is second. Neither have the stupid popups, so why wouldn't the UK just get added to the list of 'places we don't need to show it'?

Have you ever tried browsing many US news sites? They block the entire EU from even seeing their content. That's how much they care about their in-GDPR users. The idea that people cater to a global audience by just implementing the EU rules for everyone is patently false. If the UK diverges, it's free revenue to just add it to the whitelist, basically.

[shrew]

Okay, fair point, they might just re-include the UK in whatever exclusion list they have and that'll be that. But since GDPR came into force, others have followed suit, several other countries have begun implementing similar legislation.

This is anecdata, so fair warning, but over the last year (at a guess) I've noticed many US sites, FAANG companies but also smaller sites too, all flashing cookie/data protection type popups at me where they didn't previously. I've assumed that's because they need to comply with the CCPA which came into force last year, though it's totally a guess. I suppose their geoIP tracking may've just improved and spotted I'm in a GDPR country.

When does this type of legislation reach a point of critical mass where the UK is simply behind the curve and most companies just show the popup by default?

From a development perspective, having a whitelist or varying set of conditions per country adds complexity, I could very easily see a development decision being made to use GDPR as the common denominator and just code once for that, knowing that'll cover the company globally. Sure if your business relies on tracking and serving ads, then you may accept the additional complexity to behave different for different countries, but it still becomes a development decision that didn't have to be made before, and it's one with diminishing returns as legislation on privacy tightens.

[carmen_sandiego]

I'm pretty sure those hyper-annoying multiple-popup flows that happen on YouTube, Google search, etc. are completely localized.

Yes it adds complexity, but the size of the markets and companies involved means there's a massive leverage effect. If you get 1,000 people landing on your homepage, small changes in conversion don't justify engineering time or complexity, true. If you've got billions of users, engineering cost pales in comparison to the revenue gain from even a marginal improvement in conversion rate, so it gets done.

[shrew]

Very true, for a big company, the time may well be worth it, particularly for the likes of FAANG where they have UK branches of their company.

I suppose my only counter left would be "is the UK market alone worth the complexity?" Having split off from Europe, and in-fighting among ourselves to the point where we may see the UK itself splitting up again in the next decade. Is it really worth adding additional complexity for a comparatively small market when companies could simply target the continent of Europe as a single market, regardless of EU membership, and probably reach a similar audience with a similar conversion rate.

I'm probably being overly cynical and only time will tell, but I just don't feel the UK alone commands the importance to have things its own way, so to me being lumped in with the EU as the lowest common denominator seems inevitable.

[carmen_sandiego]

I think it will just depend whether the UK starts aligning with the US, say, or goes off to have it's own esoteric regulatory environment. In the latter case, yeah, it seems likely some companies will just not bother.

The UK does get advantages from being an Anglophone country though. That's one of the issues with the EU single market: it sounds great in theory--a unified regulatory system that lets you attract customers from the whole EU. In practice though, you start having to consider whether Poland or Lithuania or wherever is worth localizing for.