Hacker News Reader

This is wrong information.

Publishers can show a cookie-free site to all visitors and offer a cookie opt-in for some kind of added value, e.g. "more information for membership".

There is no governmental force pushing anybody to produce a website that diplays a "cookie dialog" even before you see what that site is about or if you like it. You are producing a false and absurd story of "governments meddling into tech produces cookie dialogs".

View on HN

What I was getting at was that while yes, publishers can show a cookie-free site, many of them stopped doing exactly that. This started happening around the time the cookie regulation was implemented.

Had the regulation at least forbade this behavior, we most likely wouldn't be in this situation.

However, thinking back, I guess it's fair to say that publishers might have implemented this blocking behavior if the governments would only have done a public awareness campaign. In this case, only a minimum set of regulations (ban force acceptance of cookies for static content) would suffice as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com