The reason that the EU cookie law broke down is that directly after the EU directive was issued, several lawyers from large companies changed their interpretation of an older 1995 directive that dictate how consent is given. The directive says that consent require "specific and informed indication", but lawyers from very large companies decided that the act of continuing using a website was the same thing as giving "specific and informed indication", thus users agreed to whatever policy or agreement that is linked in the banner.
I visited a conference during that time which had a panel where those lawyers was discussing this and even brought up a question if a person really could agree to 20 pagers of policy document from the mere fact of just continuing using the website, and their collective answer was yes (through one agreed that 30 pages would be too much). To my knowledge no legal case has ever tested this, and thus we got this ridiculous cookie notice system where things has gone from bad to worse after the 2002 directive.
You assume that every page need to have tracking cookies or that a websites would choose to have a blocking dialog if that was required in order to store and accessing information on users’ equipment. Even if we do those assumptions, its not a good result for anyone and there need to be some peace rather than war between the industry and politics, and making the concept of consent meaningless is a very risky move going forward.
Afaik you need it if you use Google Adwords. Not sure if Adwords could be changed in a compliant way.
I recently started out to implement the cookie header on my site, and discovered things are rather unclear. For example, couldn't Google somehow get global consent for all Google Ads?
There also doesn't seem to be a way to ask for consent and only trigger Google Ads if consent is given.
Maybe there are some things that Google could improve to alleviate the situation. But advertising probably also depends on at least a little bit of tracking.
If they (the politicians) want to outlaw online advertising, maybe they should just say so directly?
I visited a conference during that time which had a panel where those lawyers was discussing this and even brought up a question if a person really could agree to 20 pagers of policy document from the mere fact of just continuing using the website, and their collective answer was yes (through one agreed that 30 pages would be too much). To my knowledge no legal case has ever tested this, and thus we got this ridiculous cookie notice system where things has gone from bad to worse after the 2002 directive.