Which will have unintended consequences, like falling behind competitors, who will use it against Apple as a leverage and slowly push it from European market, which is 26% of Apple's revenue.
Average European is like average American, they are not following these political and corporational dramas, but they can tell that i.e. Samsung has features, while Apple is stale.
It was soon after. It's a requirement of GDPR to get permission for certain kinds of cookies, and seemingly every website either falls under non-exempt or can't afford to prove they're exempt.
The GDPR is what really gave it enforcement teeth though and that's when it really exploded and made the banners more intrusive and adopted by non-EU-native websites that weren't based in but still did business inside the EU.
Average European is like average American, they are not following these political and corporational dramas, but they can tell that i.e. Samsung has features, while Apple is stale.