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.

> never seem to blame the web companies for doing the naughty things on their websites

Part of the problem is that the law didn't seek to distinguish between tame first-party cookies and the really naughty third-party cookies so the burden is equal regardless of how malicious the service is.

> For the company, it's a one time JIRA ticket for a junior software engineer to code up a banner.

This is actually not true. There's a lot more that goes into a cookie banner than you might realize, and there's now an industry dominated by a small handful of players (Osano vs OneTrust)

> Part of the problem is that the law didn't seek to distinguish between tame first-party tokens and the really naughty third-party tokens

Maybe I'm an outlier, but ideally I don't want them collecting any "tokens" without my consent. I don't care if they're first party or third party or birthday party. I should be able to browse web sites in peace without some company collecting anything. If the web site doesn't work exactly the way I'd expect because I did not provide that consent, then that's on me.