Somehow we can at thanks to Europe, so that sites and app that do things well have a clear competitive advantage.
What we can be annoying is Europe not doing much to sanction abused. Like these assholes of trustarc and co that block in "processing" for 2 minutes when you refuse cookies. They pretend that it is the time to make a request to tell all the providers to not track you. But by definition if you don't want to be track there is no request they can do to tell to not keep info that they are not supposed to receive.
They aren't required at all, just don't use any tracking cookies. Cookies that are useful to the user generally don't require the banner, and many analytics tools now have the option to work without cookies (at the cost of not tracking repeat visitors).
Annoying your users with cookie popups is the price sites pay for using invasive tracking. The only miscalculation is that apparently everyone is fine paying that price
Also I’m quite sure your website is not ranked as high on Google if you don’t use GA.
The real issue is ad tracking. If you either show ads or buy ads that lead to your website you are basically forced to add tracking cookies.
Actually we already know that if you want to know how many visitors you have, GA will strongly underestimate, especially with tech literate audience. You may want the log parsing instead.
Even if you want the JS-based solution, you can do it first party, without the need for GA.
> I’m quite sure your website is not ranked as high on Google if you don’t use GA.
Sure enough to quote a source? There lots of high ranking pages, using non-GA solutions.
[0] Royal you, speaking to a significant fraction of the HN audience.
One out of three videos on Youtube short, several per video on Youtube, Facebook and X sponsored post are hidden within the timeline. That's not even talking about how much ads is outside those walled-gardens, for instance searching for something where SEO is heavily gamed like cooking recipes ends up returning websites where half the page is ads or sponsored content. I typed "buy pc" on Google and the first 4 results are paid ads labelled Sponsored, the first organic result is outside my screen. How are they not intrusive on walled-gardens?
Those cookie banners are not mandatory, functional mandatory cookies do not require consent.
> the first organic result is outside my screen.
And it’s only a referral blogpost.
Is it even worth fighting? What have we won by attempting this fight? The Internet is unusable today.
Actually for me it offered ldlc.com which is a fairly good result. With an ad-blocker, it's the first result. Is it worth fighting? If the alternative is a web that is unusable today, yes. Will it prevent the enshittifiction of the web in the long term? Probably not.