ePrivacy Regulation
The ePrivacy Regulation was a planned EU framework intended to supplement the GDPR for electronic communications, covering cookies, tracking, direct marketing and the metadata of communication services. In its work programme of February 2025 the European Commission placed the draft negotiated since 2017 (COM(2017) 10 final) on the list of proposals to be withdrawn, reasoning that no agreement was expected from the co-legislators and that the proposal had been overtaken by more recent technological as well as legislative developments. The proposal was formally withdrawn on 6 October 2025 and the withdrawal was published in the Official Journal (C/2025/5423).
In practice
For cookies and tracking the withdrawal changes nothing, because it concerns the draft regulation alone: ePrivacy Directive 2002/58/EC remains in force unchanged and continues to apply through its national implementations, which in Austria means Section 165 TKG 2021 in combination with the GDPR. If you already run your cookie and tracking practice cleanly along those lines, you are well placed regardless of whether future EU initiatives such as the announced Digital Fairness Act bring new rules.