Ireland is a common law country, and coincidentally the European headquarters of many internet giants

Ah yes I forgot about Ireland! It’s the only one though

Cyprus too.

For tax purposes AFAIK. It also has a terrible record on GDPR: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/dpc-data-protecti...

A lot of courts use rulings from other countries where the cases are similar. Any interpretation by the Berlin regional court that GDPR implies that DNT should be treated as a GDPR opt-out should be easily adopted by courts in other countries deciding similar cases.

I’d have to read this specific decision but my opinion is that while the GDPR says the user can refuse consent “by automated means” it doesn’t specify what those means are, thus making it quite hard to follow, enforce and therefore likely that other courts will decide differently on similar cases. E.g. would my own “X-Tracking-Is-Stupid: don’t track me” header be valid as refusing consent? What if I add it as a query parameter in the URL? And so on - DNT is not special in the eyes of the law.

DNT is both common practice and a documented standard; the law will take both these into account in judging it vs `X-Tracking-Is-Stupid`.

I disagree that it’s common practice or standard. The W3C never even standardized it, mainly because of low adoption: https://github.com/w3c/dnt/commit/5d85d6c3d116b5eb29fddc6935...