Why can't I load some 3rd party tools?
What author is claiming, essentially, that in a mere 2 month from now, you can sue almost any European publisher for data privacy breach. Outrageous claim require outrageous proof.
You can, you just need assurance that they're also GDPR compliant if you want to be GDPR compliant.
If the third-party violates GDPR, but requires your website to run on (e.g. third-party JS, other types of beacons), I think judges are going to have a dim view on that, and so you can't simply claim that it's them, not you. (There may be mitigations, e.g. if you have a contract with them that spells out GDPR compliance, but then they break that - but how many people have contracts for the JS they embed?)
Edit: One way this argument could be laid out is that by including such third-parties in your website, you're instructing the browser to load them, and therefore effectively forwarding GDPR-related data to them. Technically, this isn't really too different from a REST API call you'd perform on the server, or an AJAX call (although the server call doesn't necessarily forward e.g. the IP).
So if your interpretation is correct, and GDPR affects even completely anonymous users, I'll be seeing and clicking "consent box" each time I go read a newspaper or just do general browsing. Like the "we use cookies" stuff, but on steroids.
EDIT: but still, I find this hard to believe, tbh. It means no ads served to anonymous users, and this has consequences I can't even imagine.
Well, it's 2018, and most publishers rely on some 3rd party ad-tech to serve the ads. They don't have direct contracts with advertisers, and definitely has no tech in house. If 3rd party calls are prohibited, their ad revenue disappears overnight.
Will be interesting to see how it develops.
As for consent, you have to be able to refuse. A consent box popping up each time would be the dumbest way to do this, but not that different than those full-screen email/newsletter begging boxes we have now.
If we agreed that even incognito browsing contains the traces of PII, publisher has to get my consent, explicitly, that's the whole point of GDPR. I see no other option than to do popup window for each new visitor (where new == has no associated cookie). What are other options?
How will this work with Google Analytics and things like that? Will random e-shop be required to notify Google to stop using/delete PI for random persons upon request?