In a nutshell: The EU Council removed Article 88b (browser-based privacy settings instead of cookie banners) from the Digital Omnibus under pressure from Google and individual member states; data protection organisations are now mobilising the European Parliament.
A coalition of European data protection organisations led by noyb has launched the campaign “Kill the cookie banner” to encourage citizens to contact EU parliamentarians. The goal is to eliminate recurring cookie requests through browser-based privacy settings.
The coalition, which also includes BEUC, Check My Ads, the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, EDRi, EFF and ICCL, aims to implement Article 88b of the GDPR. This proposal stems from the Digital Omnibus, which the EU Commission presented in November 2025. Core idea: users could set their tracking preferences once at the browser level, while websites would have to automatically respect this setting – instead of asking for consent again with each visit.
Google and Meta had positioned themselves clearly against Article 88b during the public consultation (closed on 11 March 2026). Google demanded complete removal and argued that the regulation would endanger the monetisation capacity of websites and lead to low consent rates. Meta went further and called for the removal of Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive to allow low-risk data collection in future without any consent at all. The EU Council of the European Union silently removed Article 88b from the proposal in its position of 18 June 2026 – according to noyb under pressure from Google as well as individual member states such as France and Germany.
For compliance officers, the current situation is ambivalent: while Article 88b is not being implemented, the legal situation regarding cookie banners remains formally unchanged. noyb argues that up to 90 per cent of users consent to cookie banners, although only about 3 per cent actively want tracking – a structural problem of the ad-financed internet model, not of the GDPR itself. The campaign is now focusing on the European Parliament, which has not yet taken its own position and, according to the organisations’ assessment, could take up Article 88b again.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 29 July 2026
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