Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

The problem here is not the law, but malicious compliance by websites that don't want to give up tracking.

"Spend Five Minutes in a Menu of Legalese" is not the intended alternative to "Accept All". "Decline All" is! And this is starting to be enforced through the courts, so you're increasingly seeing the "Decline All" option right away. As it should be. https://www.techspot.com/news/108043-german-court-takes-stan...

Of course, also respecting a Do-Not-Track header and avoiding the cookie banner entirely while not tracking the user, would be even better.

No, the problem is 100% the law, because it was written in a way that allows this type of malicious compliance.

Laws need to be written well to achieve good outcomes. If the law allows for malicious compliance, it is a badly written law.

The sites are just trying to maximize profit, as anyone could predict. So write better laws.

Viewing corporations as amoral bots that are justified in squeezing every bit of profit out of humans is exactly what is wrong with our society. Someone in a big tech was the inventor of this dark pattern and they think they're awesome for finding a loophole in the well-meaning regulation, at the cost of the costumer they supposedly should serve. That person is the problem, and so are the people that followed them

"Viewing corporations as amoral bots..."

How else should we view them? Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck.

Nobody justified the behavior, only stated that corporations have proven over time to generally seek profits over all else. They provide legal cover to bad-faith actions. That wasn't the original intention, but it is absolutely the current state of the world.