Tracking cookies are not mandatory. You are not obligated to present cookie banner: you can simply drop nonessential cookies.
Your business problems aren't our concern. If you're financing your business by stealing personal information from users and selling it to data brokers, then you're a crook. Crooks tend to have high hosting expenses.
The only website that you know I use is this one. Are you saying that you run HN? I do not think you are that person.
If that's not the site you're referring to, I'm rather curious to know what site it is that you run, that's had 100m users since 2004(!), that can correlate a site user with this HN user. Will you tell, please?
And yes, your expenses aren't our problem. Don't run a website if you can't pay for it.
I don't have much sympathy for your predicament. Perhaps the market has a better use for your hosting facility than pumping out ads and tracking scripts.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
The ad networks get a lot more for tracking based ads, and the advertisers supposedly get more conversions (though targeting fraud is a real, well-documented thing).
If following the requirements of society makes your business unprofitable, too bad, having a business is optional, following the requirements of society is not.
Correct. I've only run a handful of websites in my life, but not one of them has ever served ads.
I believe they are a protest by largely US-owned companies against regulation, designed to annoy internet users and turn them against regulation.
Even if this is true, it's something that should have been expected by EU legislators. Their beliefs seem to be that companies are acting in bad faith by secretly tracking users and misusing the information that they gather (basically true), and also that if they impose vague rules that companies need to get consent for tracking then they'll act in good faith and give users clear and convenient ways of opting out (ha ha ha).
If I look at the changes implemented by local telecommunications companies, local banks, local supermarket loyalty programs, local pizza delivery chains, local real estate brokers, etc - these types of businesses had all kinds of widespread shenanigans before GDPR, but now they overwhelmingly have acted in good faith, and have given users clear and convenient ways of opting out (because, really, they didn't have a choice). Like, we don't see EU phone carriers selling location data to advertisers the way they do in USA - now that is a significant thing compared to some blog putting on a cookie.
For most companies, the transition has happened reasonably well - it's just that a few (but large and highly visible) global companies are holding out because of political reasons preventing enforcement - mostly stemming the fact that Ireland's DPA is currently permitted to unilaterally shield them from the rest of EU and has motivation to do it because it's financially beneficial for Ireland to have Facebook/Google/etc have their EU domicile be in Ireland.
It has been - the regulation explicitly outlaws such malicious pseudo-compliance. The problem is that GDPR enforcement has been severely lacking, so malicious actors are allowed to run free.