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

I am kind of frustrated by the widespread misunderstandings in this thread.

Laws are best when they are abstract, so that there is no need for frequent updates and they adapt to changing realities. The European "cookie law" does not mandate cookie banners, it mandates informed consent. Companies choose to implement that as a banner.

There is no doubt that the goals set by the law are sensible. It is also not evident that losing time over privacy is so horrible. In fact, when designing a law that enhances consumer rights through informed consent, it is inevitable that this imposes additional time spent on thinking, considering and acting.

It's the whole point, folks! You cannot have an informed case-by-case decision without spending time.

Yes. It's not the regulation but the misguided implementation that's to blame.

Sites and cookie banner plugins could just accept DNT signals from browsers and no productivity would be lost.

DNT does not provide informed consent. It may, if set to not track, imply denial, but the reverse is not true. If DNT is accepting or unset, the site needs to fall back to the banner to get consent. And at that point you may as well prompt everyone with the banner instead of complicating the codebase with extra logic for a DNT edge case.

Mm.

For existing privacy options — location, microphone, camera — Safari on iOS has the options of "ask"/"deny"/"allow".

I wouldn't be surprised by legislation for a Do Not Track option in DMA designed Gatekeepers' browsers, defaulting to "ask", where all three options must be handled accordingly by websites.

"Ask" would also have to be the default behaviour when no preference is transmitted.

Again, as the law in question requires informed consent, "allow" and "ask" end up being the same thing. A new DNT law as you propose would contradict the other law of which we speak.