I don't think that "unlimited user tracking by advertising networks, regardless of good-faith user efforts to limit data tracking" was at all part of any tacit agreements reached by the internet community. The principle that communication networks should be transparent in how they operate, and allow users of the network to meaningfully control their interactions with them is a meta-principle that is pretty clearly implicit in the design of the internet, and I don't think the current widespread use of tracking technologies and data analysis without informed user consent is consistent with those principles.
"It's a force of nature" is only a good argument against a policy when it is accompanied by other valid arguments. There are many things which are "only human nature" or "a force of nature" which for the sake of society and/or personal liberty we restrict.
Saying "it's only a force of nature" won't get you far with a judge. And telling people that they can't use the internet if they value their privacy is an unreasonable restriction on personal liberty. Period.
I agree that Google can user track, but only so far, and if they need to go to such extremes, we need rules, guidelines or even laws to draw the line very starkly.
I don't use an iPhone, but I imagine if it's like other browsers, there's some setting that says:
[x] Accept cookies from sites [ ] Accept third party cookies
When I don't check the second box, it doesn't mean "Don't accept cookies, unless condition X is true", e.g. the web site implemented a popular hack. It means really don't accept third party cookies, and I don't give a shit if the +1 button breaks.
It doesn't sound like Safari's behavior on the hidden forms is intentional. It sounds like a bug, but it's irrelevant either way. I hope Apple patches this soon and forces people to opt in to third party cookies.
I'm glad that they actually set the default to reject them (a funny contrast to the address book policy). Firefox allows third party cookies by default because I always have to turn it off when setting up the browser on a new PC.
The WSJ also ran a blog post about this which says (at the very end):
"An update to the software that underlies Safari has closed the loophole that allows cookies to be set after the automatic submission of invisible forms. Future public versions of Safari could incorporate that update. The people who handled the proposed change, according to software documents: two engineers at Google."
"software documents" is linked to http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/92142
So it appears that Google engineers have already closed this loophole.
This somehow reminds me of the time when Chrome marketing ended up paying for links to their site, and then the Web search group had to punish them with a demotion.