[hoorayimhelping]

It's not like this is limited to "bad players." It's standard procedure for almost every website. Whether that's good or bad is a separate topic - the point it's not just nefarious people using cookies to watch user behavior. Normal people use this information to make their websites better and create more effective products for people. Which is exactly what people said when this legislation was introduced. So instead of actually fixing anything, they made it worse. Now we're being tracked _and_ we have annoying nags that block content show up on every website, exactly like people said would happen when this legislation was introduced.

It's the same tired nonsense as when regulators try to tax a business that's already operating on thin margins and act surprised when the business passes the cost to their customers instead of eating it.

I'm not upset with the intent of what they were trying to do, which was noble; the upsetting thing is that it was patently obvious their hamfisted implementation would lead to this outcome, and they did it anyway, knowing they could count on people to deflect blame away from them.