GDPR rules in practice seem to turn into the "this site uses cookies" notice but on mega steroids. Privacy control is great, but it's just not interesting to have a checkbox or agreement click through on every new site visited.
By the way there even is a simple standardized way to know if I give my consent for tracking me or not without asking - the Do Not Track HTTP header field. That's a pity Microsoft has screwed it by turning it on by default. I wish GDPR would just require every website to respect this flag.
- If your browser doesn't have this option yet, write its developers, product managers, or CEO, voicing your most humble request that they try do something that does work, at least with some pages some of the time, to try to proactively automatically agree to GDPR and cookies. (Or automatically disagree with them, discard cookies, whatever.)
I promise you that it is possible technically to do something that works on at least 1 page, that other web sites could mimic the interaction of and have it work on them too.
Sites won't all support browsers' solutions but if browsers can automate something, then some web sites can adapt to it. (By using the same interaction, names, etc - i.e. legally clicking for the user, or so that the web site can't tell if the browser sent that automated per the setting chosen by the user, or if the user manually clicked. Even if they can only automate ones that closely match certain element names etc it will still be a step ahead.)
But they realise that almost nobody actually wants the tracking, and that does not align with their interests.
They are currently just trying the waters, see what they can get away with, most certainly already have a backup plan they will enable at the first sign of trouble.
The GDPR is very different : it does not prevent offering legit features by itself. So I often happen to leave a site if I'm not satisfied by their GDPR implementation and they try to force tracking on me, I won't sell my privacy that cheap if I'm given the choice. That's something I couldn't do with cookies and I just was accepting their notice blindly.