The on-by-default setting was technically a violation of the standard, which meant that participants felt they could ignore the setting for IE, which didn't help the initiative for sure.

The industry-led-initiatives are all basically bad, for the obvious reasons. So many of them amount to telling ad networks whether or not the massive amount of data they have collected about you should be part of the consideration for what ads to show (for now) — many offer no possible way to opt out of recording and storing such data in the first place.

This is a situation where legislation is probably the only answer.