ECJ finds IAB Europe responsible for TCF consent spam popups across the Internet

We are now in the process of making the Cloudflare Zaraz Consent Managegement Platform &quot;compliant&quot; with the IAB demands. It&#x27;s mandatory in order to run Google Ads in Europe.<p>Their demands are completely countering privacy and will only make our CMP more hostile towards users and less privacy oriented. It&#x27;s ridiculous. But they have this alignment with Google and so you have to do what they say.

&gt; &quot;IAB Europe has sought to evade its responsibility for this charade. But the European Court of Justice has set it straight. This decision will not only end the biggest spam operation in history. It will deal a mortal wound to the online tracking-based advertising industry.”<p>If this turns out to be true it would be huge. But I&#x27;m (as always) skeptical of GDPR-related de facto enforcement, let&#x27;s hope I&#x27;m wrong this time.

From the article:<p>&gt; IAB Europe argued that it is not responsible under the GDPR as a “data controller” because it allegedly only sets the rules for how data should be used, but does not process the data itself. The Court rightly rejected this, and confirmed that IAB Europe, as management body for the TCF, is a “data controller” under the GDPR.<p>IAB stands for Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eesc.europa.eu&#x2F;en&#x2F;policies&#x2F;policy-areas&#x2F;enterprise&#x2F;database-self-and-co-regulation-initiatives&#x2F;46" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eesc.europa.eu&#x2F;en&#x2F;policies&#x2F;policy-areas&#x2F;enterpri...</a>

I don&#x27;t know about everyone else but I&#x27;d like more context.<p>&quot;Is responsible for the consent popups&quot;... ok. What happens now?

I visited US a couple of years ago and to this day I still think of how smooth all the websites felt over there.

Named complainants include the estimable Dr. Johnny Ryan, doing God’s work again.<p>“People across Europe have been plagued by fake “consent” popups every day on almost every website and app since the GDPR was introduced almost six years ago”, said Dr Johnny Ryan of ICCL Enforce.<p>Grateful to have him onside

why is it that only the EU seems to care about Internet privacy?