Not because of the law but because those pushing tracking and designing the banners intentionally make them intrusjve. Purely technical cookies (eg login, spam protection) don't need a consent by the user.
No website needs GA. You choose to have it for whatever reason but there's not ever a need to use GA. There are many less intrusive ways to father statistics than to sell your users to Google.
There is definitely a need for online analytics. Analytics are as important to me as crash reports.
* It helps me focus on the content my users need the most, and see what triggers donations.
* It helps me catch and diagnose traffic dips, and react to them.
* It helps me catch and diagnose unexpected issues. For instance, caching changes broke a component that accounts for 30% of my revenue. It would have stayed broken for a whole month if I didn't see the dip in events.
I will replace Google Analytics soon, but even as a tech-savvy person, it's a dreadful task. Google Analytics is free, simple, and incredibly reliable. Setting up your own self-hosted alternative, or paying a monthly fee for an alternative is a lot less desirable.
Yes I absolutely agree it can be useful.anf satisfying to see analytics. But it also means you send your users' data to another place where you know it will be recycled etc.
There are alternatives but as you say sadly none are as easy - probably because none have as much budget behind them. I see a number of comparison articles for gdpr compliant analytics, so it seems to have become its own market of sorts.
I have opted myself out of most Google services due to the intrusive nature, I wouldn't want to impose it on my site visitors (but I also have no need to monetize, so maybe a different ballpark).
If you want people to do the right thing, it has to be easy, or it has to pay off. GDPR is incredibly hard, and it's costly.
Just knowing what I need to do requires me to wear my lawyer hat. Actually doing it requires me to wear my developer hat, or to pay other people a monthly fee.
I will eventually move to another solution, but it has an infinitely lower impact on my users than the problems I help them solve.
I will switch this because I swore to do the right thing [1], and because I have a lot of time on my hands. I can't reasonably expect amateur bloggers to do the same. It's an unreasonable burden on people who don't run a website for a living.
Well, maybe legislation like GDPR will incentivize Google to build a less intrusive analytics suite. Or force the industry to innovate to create a new form of analytics.
How many sites have seriously thought about reducing Google analytics and intrusive ads? If it's even 1% then the banners unequivocally HAVE made the web better.
Commission (leaders of which are selected by your government that you presumably voted for) makes a draft.
Commission consults widely (usually online consultation) and all national ministries comment.
Commission redrafts and sends to parliament and council.
In the council your government has (most of the time) veto power.
In the parliament your and other countries delegates vote on it.
Then parliament (people's representatives) and council (national government representatives) sit together, find the middle ground of a final draft.
Parliament and council then each do a final vote.
Depending on the exact type of legal document it either enters into force right away or your national administration, parliament and government create their own national version of it conform to the EU document and make that a national law.
That's a pretty heavy process but it's just wrong to say that the voters don't have influence. National governments and delegates both can say no.
Now is the parliament representative just because people are not from just one country? Is your national parliament representative even if there are people from different regions/cities/...? Is your major democratically elected just because that other suburb also got to vote? That's just an absurd position.
The legislation was long overdue. It's a bit more complex than it ought to be but the intentions are just fine. The issue is that there's a huge number of organisations that prefer not to comply or have every intention to make things intrusive and annoying so that people click "accept" to make it go away.
Google inserts many of those banners due to google analytics or ads being used. Their main intention is to gather more user data and make users provide data. This is NOT a 1:1 match with what site owners will want - which is to have users and some basic analytics.
The cookie banners are hostile and intrusive because they are designed to be so. The hope is that users are trained to click 'yes' to get rid of the annoyance.
The GDPR explicitly states that technical cookies are fine, so most sites wouldn't need any banner except for using google analytics & ads. So use a different analytics and you don't need a banner.
It's not the law, it's the implementation and the oligopoly of and companies pushing this implementation.
