The post is a campaign for replacing per-site cookie consent popups with a browser or device setting that sends a single privacy preference to websites. The core claim is that EU law already defaults to no tracking, but the current banner regime turned that into endless dark-pattern prompts that train people to click "accept". A lot of the conversation sharpened an important distinction the campaign itself can blur. These are not really "cookie banners". They are tracking consent banners. Session cookies, login state, carts, and explicitly requested preferences usually do not need consent in the first place. What triggers the mess is adtech, third-party embeds, analytics stacks, and broader data processing that companies want but cannot justify as strictly necessary.
The strongest consensus was that the browser was always the right control point. People pointed to Do Not Track and the newer Global Privacy Control idea as proof the technical shape is not new. What was missing was legal force. Without enforcement, sites ignored the signal. That is why many people liked this proposal despite sounding like
DNT all over again. If a browser signal becomes binding, the compliance surface gets much simpler. A site that still throws a consent wall at a user who already said no is plainly violating the rule. Several comments also stressed why banners became so hostile. Accept is usually one click, reject is buried, and many sites either fail to store refusal or wire their consent platform incorrectly so trackers fire anyway. That made the current regime feel less like privacy protection and more like malicious compliance.
The practical limit is that a browser signal does not magically eliminate every prompt. Third-party videos, fonts, maps, and other embedded services can still create separate consent issues. Some comments argued that if you truly ban tracking, banners survive for those other cases. Others pushed back that this is exactly why sites should stop spraying third-party code everywhere and move to server-side or privacy-preserving alternatives. There was also a recurring business argument underneath all of this. Many people want tracking gone, but some warned that publishers will replace cookie popups with "pay or reconfigure your browser to allow tracking" flows unless regulators also clamp down on consent-or-pay and actually enforce existing rules. So the thread mostly landed here: browser-level consent is the right UX fix, but it only delivers if regulators make the signal binding, punish dark patterns, and keep shrinking the list of data uses that can plausibly claim to need consent at all.
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