Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe

People blame the cookie banners themselves or the legislation that "made them necessary" but somehow never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites that make them subject to the law.

The "cookie banner problem" exists because it's primarily end users that are shouldering the burden of them, and not the companies. For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner. For everyone else, it's thousands of wasted seconds per year. Make the law hit companies where it hurts: their balance sheets.

They don't technically even need a banner per se, just respect the user's "do not track" browser setting, or put it in a settings screen, or don't use any 3rd party trackers.

But a lot of businesses assume they need to ask permission for placing any cookies, which is simply not correct. Local analytics tracking is fine, it's only when the user can be tracked across multiple separate websites that they need explicit permissions. And the user should not be annoyed into making that decision.