[wkat4242]

The EP were just dumb. They let themselves be swayed by industry lobbyists to weaken the regulation and allow the cookiewalls. Now the EU gets blamed for this mess.

What they should have done is raise the "Do Not Track" flag to legal status. If the flag is enabled it must be obeyed without any further questions to the end-users. Making it mandatory would have solved the problem with this flag which was that everyone simply ignored it and it only added an extra bit of entropy for fingerprinting.

If this flag had become mandatory, the browsers that have removed it would have brought it back immediately because it actually would have become functional. Also, the onus would have been on the advertisers to stop friction for those who don't mind to be tracked. Instead of tricking people with cookiewalls the focus would have been on making the "tracked" experience as frictionless as the flag itself is.

But I guess the industry lobbied very heavily for this flag not to become mandatory because it would have instantly cut their tracking to near-zero and therefore remove the raison d'etre of many of these adtech businesses. It would have shocked the industry more than Apple's ID thing did to facebook. No big deal though IMO because this industry is undesirable and it would have triggered some real innovation in context-driven ads that are not privacy invasive.

It would have been the only good option though for the citizens. What the EU has done has only backfired on itself with everyone including the lobbyists blaming them for the cookiewall mess.