Luckily for us, in this age of centralized internet, you only need to hit with fines a couple of cookie dialog providers and you are set.

OneTrust, who seems to do a sizeable fraction, get it right on their own website. I have never seen a OneTrust dialog elsewhere have equal prominence given to the reject and accept pathways.

Nope. Apparently selling conconformant GDPR-compliance services is not against the law, only buying them is? Which makes some sense, but in any case OneTrust still sell dark-pattern banners to (at least) hundreds of websites even after a sizeable batch of them has been ruled illegal[1].

[1] https://noyb.eu/en/226-complaints-lodged-against-deceptive-c...

Scummy as that is, I don't think that providing the banners should be illegal, as otherwise it's a hop and a step to "providing software that can be used illegally is in itself illegal". Which makes text editors illegal without "safeguards" baked in.

However, if OneTrust are selling the software under the promise that if the customers configure it that way, then it's compliant, then that's some kind of misrepresentation (which is illegal, software or not). Just as if I sell a USB flash drive as an anti-5G-field dongle, that's illegal, but it'll not illegal to just sell the flash drive.

I think they do care, but with limited means they cannot tackle the whole problem at once. So there go after one bad accept after another, and the others eventually adjust their practices to be a bit less illegal.

On the French web you can see the evolution on newspaper websites, which used to have these popups with an easy accept button and difficult, hidden paths for refusal, which eventually moved to a simpler "reject" button with subdued colours or a "reject and read the article" a bit less visible than accept, but still easy enough to spot, and now many have two equal buttons... but "reject" leads to a page that says "you can reject cookies but then you can't read the newspaper, you can pay instead".

You can really see how they try to go as far as they think they can, and adjust their behaviour even without having been targeted themselves. I have good expectations that everything will eventually get better even if it will take time.

The same happened with Google and Youtube. They used to have pop-ups with large and obvious "Accept" button and a clicking game if you wanted to reject tracking. The EU put a pressure on them and now the popups have two equal "Reject" and "Accept" buttons.

The current situation is still a problem. If you disable cookies, you get the banner every single time.

The law should outlaw that behavior so that people can continue to conveniently block cookies. Google is an ad network and controls chrome. They could come up with a universal opt out (like X-DO-NOT-TRACK) that works with such a law.

It's up to your user agent what it displays and which cookies to store. It's the user agent that needs to change to stop bugging you. That's what brave are doing

My point is that Brave shouldn't have to do this.

> I think they do care, but with limited means they cannot tackle the whole problem at once.

That always seems like such a cop out. Ooohhh, I'm government, I'm so poor I can't enforce the law! Maybe let regular people help. If every time I found a web site that didn't follow cookie rules or GDPR or whatever, I could one-click sue them and get $1,000 or so, I would probably quit my job and just browse the web all day. There are so many naughty sites that count on toothless enforcement, people could make a fortune AND the law would get enforced.