The cookie banner is there to punish people who have cookies turned off or set to be deleted upon browser/tab close - and generally annoy everyone else.

Think about how obsessive companies are about "UX" and how disruptive the banner is. Bitch-slapping people for fighting against tracking is more important to them than the user being able to access or use the site at all.

It's gotten entirely out of hand.

Most EU national government websites have cookie banners. Even the European Commission website has a cookie banner!

This should have been implemented at the browser level. Let the browser generate a nice consistent UI to nag EU users when visiting websites about accepting cookies and let the rest of us opt out.

Or if the legal department is concerned that someone could claim a cookie is non-functional, so to save the uncertainty and expense they advise always showing the banner. Especially since everyone else does.

It seems like there should be a parallel to “tragedy of the commons” that talks about how a good idea coupled with extreme penalties can lead to a bad outcome by making any risk calculation result in “jesus we just can’t take any chances here”.

Yes, and my life world be more convenient if this banner would go away or I could declare a universal preference.

I miss the old Internet where nobody cared about their privacy.

Not just "really nice". It must be mandatory to respect it.

The only hope I still have is for some kind of fully local LLM-driven "agent" browser that does the browsing for me, navigating search engines, cookie banners and showing me what it found, nothing else.

Unfortunately entire businesses are built around preventing people from using bots, for obvious reasons, so the only obvious way forward to make browsing the web a better experience will also mean ending up on the wrong side of that battle.

The worst part is that it wasn’t even malicious compliance: the cookie banners they added seldom even satisfied law, in ways completely obvious if you just read the law (which is pretty easy reading, only a few thousand words for the relevant parts). I don’t understand why relevant commissions didn’t make more noise about that, because it was obvious that major players were deliberately poisoning public perception.

That heavily incentivizes me to advocate against any such law.

Not if we ban third-party ads.

Can you source your claim? Because it seems like it would create a competitive advantage for a non-hostile advertising company. Websites aren’t any happier about cookie banners than users are. If it’s just an emotional, spiteful reaction, the grownups should be able to make a fortune.

And if the regulators didn't predict such compliance they should be replaced with competent actors in their jobs.

That was the obvious outcome. What did people predict: site owners leaving money on the table? Who pays for operating the sites then?

If by 'companies' you mean https://commission.europa.eu/ then sure.

Yes, the second one. I don't really care; it's not "my" data. It's data about me.

When I walk down the street and sometime sees me go by, those aren't my photons they caught. By analogy, same with my browsing history.

I know of no regulation that mandated cookie banners. I just know a lot of sites who chose to use banners because the operators are somewhere between weasely and malicous.