EU abandons ePrivacy, AI liability reforms as bloc shifts focus to AI competitiveness | TechCrunch

A long stalled bid to beef up European Union rules around online tracking technologies — and put penalties on a similar footing to the bloc’s data protection framework, GDPR, which allows for fines of up to 4% of annual turnover for breaches — has been withdrawn by the Commission after co-legislators failed to reach agreement over the plan.

The original proposal to update the ePrivacy Directive, and turn it into a fully fledged Pan-EU regulation, dates back to 2017 so the writing…