The EU made us click cookie banners for years, admitted it was broken, and now wants to fix it by weakening GDPR

You have clicked "accept all" on a cookie banner today and you probably did it without reading it, because 93% of people never go past the first screen, which a French data protection regulator confirmed through its own rulings and then kept enforcing the system anyway.

This is what the consent banner regime actually produced, not informed privacy choices, but a reflex. A daily ritual that annoyed everyone, protected almost nobody in practice, and generated hundreds of millions in fines for implementation details while the underlying tracking continued.

In November 2025, the European Commission's own explanatory memo called consent fatigue and the proliferation of cookie banners a problem "whose regulatory solution is long overdue." and they built it, enforced it, and long overdue.

Now in order to fix this, the proposed fix is the Digital Omnibus package, which moves cookie rules into GDPR and introduces browser level consent signals. On paper that is closer to what actually works, which is what your browser already does when it blocks third party cookies without asking you every time. In practice, privacy organisations including NOYB and the EDPB itself are warning that the Omnibus also narrows the definition of personal data, potentially removing protections that currently exist. The EDPB put it plainly, the proposed changes go far beyond a technical amendment and would significantly narrow the scope of EU data protection law. So the trajectory is: annoying broken system for fifteen years, followed by a fix that privacy advocates say trades away core protections to reduce the annoyance.

In 2022, a legal analysis in the Tilburg Law Review argued that browser level defaults blocking nonessential cookies by default was the right architecture from the start. Firefox and Brave already do this without legislation. My take is the regulation caught up to the browser, and apparently brought a gift for the ad industry along with it.