“This was not the first time the European Commission had attempted to correct for the permissions pollution.”

It seems sometimes that browsing the web these days is just constant closing of pop-ups and banners, and ignoring those that cannot be closed: old school modals and in-page ads, Substack-style “subscribe to my newsletter”on-scroll pop-ups, cookie banners and popovers, (relatively new) VERIFY YOU ARE HUMAN, HUMAN_ interstitials. Yeah, it is somewhat unfair to bundle the cookie banners into this list, but stripped down to the user experience, they are a nuisance – the road to hell is paved with tiny, slow close boxes. Nick Heer at Pixel Envy recently did the lord’s work of writing a succinct summary of recent efforts to fix this experience, and significant energy expended to derail those efforts. At the core of it is the Kill the Cookie Banner initiative, which might be somewhat unfortunate naming; while companies like Meta want to get rid of the cookie banners altogether to avoid having to ask the user for any permission (automatic opt in to data collection), the initiative goes the…