Those companies can cry all they want but they get ZERO sympathy from me. I'm sick of having to install three extensions to counter their hostile behaviour towards my privacy.
I understand you feel companies have a hostile behavior towards your privacy. But you're part of a minority. If people really cared that much about cookies, the market would have responded accordingly and there wouldn't be any need for this kind of regulation at all. Why impose your obsession with privacy to the rest of us?
That's naive.
For one thing, most people are not technically knowledgeable and don't understand the extent to which they are being tracked.
For another, even those who would care about such issues can't spend their entire lives becoming experts in every ethical, legal, regulatory and financial field that might affect them. It simply isn't humanly possible, which is one reason we have laws crafted by specialists but applying to everyone.
Your argument only makes any sense if everyone knows about what's going on, understands the implications, and still doesn't care.
You apparently haven't heard of the invisible hand.[1]
The role of experts is to educate and influence, not to impose their own values. People should be allowed to chose what's best for them and put their trust where they want, not be forced into putting their trust on bureaucrats.
Basing your site revenue on advertising doesn't require trackig across sites/domains, supercookies written in flash, circumvention of user-defined browser privacy settings, etc (which is probably what blub is talking about). Honestly it doesn't even require cookies or retaining IP logs, though I don't think anyone here is arguing that those are malicious.
That's why your comment is a fallacy. Websites providing me content for free, and websites respecting the privacy of their users are not mutually exclusive concepts.