Content owners don't want a standard way because they depend on user apathy, confusion and dark patterns to "trick" users into allowing websites to monetise their consumers data.

I say "consumers" rather than "customers" because at this point it feels more like the people buying data are the customers, rather than the actual daily website visitors.

Agreed, which is why it would take legislation for orgs to use it, even if a standard was agreed upon.

If it's uniform and learnable, the possibility to trick people shrinks dramatically.

Hasn't this been tried before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

> Then when a user visits a site, P3P will compare what personal information the user is willing to release, and what information the server wants to get – if the two do not match, P3P will inform the user and ask if he/she is willing to proceed to the site, and risk giving up more personal information.[4] As an example, a user may store in the browser preferences that information about their browsing habits should not be collected. If the policy of a Website states that a cookie is used for this purpose, the browser automatically rejects the cookie.

This sounds ideal, or at bare minimum, vastly superior to preferences boxes which take 10+ seconds or more of JavaScript to load, and impede access to content, (and sometimes don't load properly and never go away).