[mrweasel]

The companies made this worse for themselves by continuously trying to skirt around the rules and regulations.

When the cookie-law was first instituted I worked for an e-commerce site and was tasked with ensuring that we'd be compliant. It would have been crazy simple to implement, but no, because management, encouraged by the companies selling the tracking and re-targeting solutions kept insisting that I was reading the rules incorrectly. By incorrectly they meant: We want to be able to track and target customers all the time, regardless of the rules. The result was scraping my solution that truly allowed users to opt in, in favour of a commercial solution that just blocked then entire site until you clicked "Okay" and which wouldn't actually stop tracking if you dismissed it somehow.

Yeah, the rules are getting increasingly complicate and to some extend requires experts. That is because of businesses that have failed so miserably in regulating itself.