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

Why should websites even be trusted with implementing these banners in the first place? Browser vendors should be responsible for implementing these controls per-origin. Give a little banner pop-up built into Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and the rest. Have it display every time a new site sets a cookie for the first time. Or have it reject every cookie by default, unless I whitelist a site. This would result in a consistent user-experience across the board, and I'd actually be able to trust that I'm not being tracked.

Instead, we are trusting the very websites we are blaming on tracking us in the most decietful, malicious ways possible to self-regulate and implement these controls. So now every website gets a shitty banner - on top of all the other annoying in-page banners and popups which are a staple of 2020s web design - that asks us if we want cookies. All these banners look different, are positioned differently on the page, appear at different times after the page is loaded, and function differently. So there's no consistency. And 90% of the time you can't disable all the cookies anyway, because there's that little grayed out toggle control for "strictly necessary cookies." How do I know one of those cookies you consider "strictly-necessary" or "crucial for site functionality" doesn't connect back to some evil tracking algorithm, the blocking of which was the whole point of this banner debacle in the first place?

So we have essentially asked websites to self-regulate the way the US's vitamin/supplement industury does, except its worse because I don't have to click a fucking banner before I take a capsule of what may or may not be vitamin C.

So again, why isn't this the responsibility of browser vendors? Am I taking crazy pills? Am I going insane or is the world going insane?

/rant

The law isn't about cookies - it's about obtaining consent to process personal data.

You need to ask permission to track people and to do other things with their personal data.

Cookies are one method to do that, but any other method (like local storage or storing session state in a URL parameter) also counts.

Hence, it is not possible to have a system where a browser can tell a site what kinds of processing the user thinks are OK, as it would be too complicated.