I recently noticed that a fraction of the "vendors" allow deselecting the "legitimate interest" but have the "consent" tick box marked and unmodifiable.

Consider the following page:

https://www.brighthub.com/environment/renewable-energy/artic...

The following vendors have un-deselectable "consent" tickboxes:

   Skimbit Ltd 
   Confiant Inc. 
   Lumen Research Limited 
   Visarity Technologies GmbH
   DoubleVerify Inc.  
   Revcontent, LLC 
   Adssets AB 
   Integral Ad Science (incorporating ADmantX) 
   Mirando GmbH & Co KG 
   Polar Mobile Group Inc. 
   Rockabox Media Ltd 
   Telecoming S.A. 
   Seenthis AB 
   HUMAN 
   Papirfly AS 
   NEXD 
   One Tech Group GmbH 
   illuma technology limited 
   CHEQ AI TECHNOLOGIES 
   Adjust Digital A/S
   VRTCAL Markets Inc 
   Cavai AS 
   Kiosked Ltd 
   Protected Media LTD 
   Oracle Data Cloud - Moat 
   Bannernow, Inc. 
   Jetpack Digital LLC 
   GeoEdge
   Ensighten
   IVO Media Ltd 
   Online Media Solutions LTD 
   Mobkoi Ltd 
   Redbranch, Inc dba Fraudlogix
   Alphalyr SAS 
   Silverbullet Data Services Group 
   Stream Eye OOD 
   adbalancer Werbeagentur GmbH 
   Somplo Ltd 
   Velocity Made Good LLC 
   Vyde Ltd. 
   Adelaide Metrics Inc 
   Sqreem Technologies Private Limited 
   TMT Digital Inc 
   dpa-infocom GmbH 
   Brandhouse/Subsero A/S 
   streaMonkey GmbH 
   Alkimi 
   Zeit Agency ApS 
   Sitewit, Corp 
   AccountInsight Ltd 
   Aderize, Inc. 
   fraud0 GmbH 
   Channel99, Inc. 
   Videobot Ltd 
   Appstock LTD. 
   Dando online LTD 
   EMBRACE Systems GmbH 
   Hiili SL 
   YIELDBIRD SP. Z O.O. 
   Volentio JSD Limited 
   BEAPUP SOLUTIONS LTD 
   Public Good Software Inc. 
   Kidoz Inc. 
   DataDome SA 
   Sarigato Sp. z o.o. 
   Gesher Software LTD dba bridgeupp 
   Playdigo Inc 
   Sipo Inc 
   EliteAppgrade 
   SpinX Pte Ltd 
   Creatopy INC 
   Codevelop Technologies GmbH 
   Adgrid Media, LLC 
   ProgrammaticX LTD 
   Nitrouppi LTD 
   9 Dots Media Ltd 
   Vudoo Pty Ltd 
   Mobavenue Media Pvt Ltd 
   Carbonatix LTD

2) Are these even legal under GDPR rules?

3) Does this not nullify arguments by certain 3 letter agencies that users "consent" to their tracking?

4) Who is behind these companies? Any idea on how to approach this from an investigative journalism angle? Can we figure out the headquarters, employee counts, CEO's of these companies?

5) If "undeselectable consent tickboxes" qualify as legally valid consent, doesn't this set a precedent to foist off miryads of types of lack of consent as "consent"? Will this enable legalizing rape? Where does this Pandora's box end? How is this any different from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fQsrwBi2Jo

6) As far as I understand, an illegal contract is void. If the forms submitted by users contained undeselectable "consent tickboxes"; then the forms no longer constitute legal contracts. Observe that this is regardless of the preferences of all the other tickboxes: even if users were to lazy to deselect all the deselectable tickboxes, the mere presence of deselectable tickboxes voids these forms as contracts. This means that all the other vendors didn't receive any consent, since their specific submitted form-as-a-contract is void, even if the majority of the vendors had consent tickboxes that could be deselected. It would seem prudent for such companies to insist that the forms don't contain undeselectable tickboxes for any companies since it would nullify the consent they hope to receive.