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.

There is a new signal, GPC, that does the same thing and has been blessed by the advertising industry.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Se...

> Non-standard: This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on production sites facing the Web: it will not work for every user. There may also be large incompatibilities between implementations and the behavior may change in the future.

I tried looking at the various browser standards positions, and as far as I can see, nobody has even asked Blink or WebKit if they are interested in supporting it. Is there any movement on this at all? The official website says that it’s part of “several major browsers”, but this seems dishonest when the biggest browser that supports it is Firefox with ~2.5% market share and no actual major browser seems to be aware of its existence.

There's movement from the Internet Advertising Bureau, they explicitly say that this signal must be adhered to if the header is present, and this signal must be forwarded to Demand Side Platforms.

I mean is there any movement in getting major browsers to adopt this?

Normally when a spec. like this is written that needs adoption from web browsers, an explainer is written and then the major rendering engines are asked for their feedback. For instance, here’s an explainer:

https://github.com/krgovind/first-party-sets

Here’s where WebKit was asked for their position on it:

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/93

Here’s where Mozilla was asked for their position on it:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/350

Here’s the process Blink goes through to get a new feature like this going:

https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/

I tried to find where this was done for GPC and couldn’t find anything. Did they just write a spec. and not bother doing any of the work involved in getting it adopted? Or is there progress being made that I didn’t see? Hence my question: Is there any movement on this at all? Or is the process of getting it adopted by Blink and WebKit at absolute zero?