If we subscribed to this logic:

"Either put the banner up or get rid of all the junk that you've plugged into your web site."

then we'd still be setting cookies, but we'd be telling users about it after we did so. This is exactly what most sites are doing right now, and it's clearly farcical.

When you start attacking anyone who depends on advertising on the Internet - by which I guess you mean Google, Facebook, Twitter and every commercial news site in existence - then I start to lose you. Those services cost billions, and somebody has to pay for it.