[tempestn]

From my perspective, a lot of the problem is that there are very legitimate uses for cookies and other types of local storage, outside of advertising and other sorts of tracking. IE remembering user preferences, knowing what messages they've seen, that kind of thing. It would be a huge hindrance to not be able to persist any kind of state between visits. The real issue in most cases are third party cookies from ads and other trackers, but in almost everyone's understanding these are all lumped together into the single category of 'cookies'.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as "first party cookies fine, third party bad", since when you're on a domain like google.com for example, a whole lot of tracking goes on with first party cookies. But still, that can be dealt with. If I were coming up with a regulation (be it enforced at the browser or site level) it would make a distinction between first party cookies on domains serving up to X users per month, first party cookies on domains serving over X users per month, and third party cookies on all domains. The first of those categories could, I think, be unregulated. Save messages and/or restrictions for the other two and I think it would go a lot further toward achieving the goals of these sorts of initiatives, while being much less of a useless annoyance.

Firefox is going in this direction somewhat with their default blocking of third party cookies, but there's nothing they can really do unilaterally to treat first party cookies on google.com differently from bobsblog.com.