Thought Leadership
European privacy organizations want to abolish annoying cookie banners for good. They are calling on citizens to contact members of the European Parliament.
A coalition of European and international consumer, civil liberties, and privacy organizations has launched the campaign “Kill the cookie banner.” The coalition is led by the Austrian organization noyb, with participants including BEUC, Check My Ads, the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, EDRi, EFF, and ICCL. The campaign’s goal is to get citizens to contact their members of the European Parliament directly by email and voice support for abolishing recurring cookie prompts.
The EU Commission had proposed in November of last year, as part of the so-called Digital Omnibus, to replace constant cookie banners with one-time privacy settings established at the browser level. This proposal is known as Article 88b of the GDPR. Users would have been able to set their tracking preferences once in their browser settings, with websites required to automatically respect that choice instead of asking for consent on every visit.
Cookie banner: Resistance from Google and Meta
The public consultation on the proposal ended on March 11, 2026. In its submission, Google argued in favor of deleting Article 88b entirely. The company claimed the rule would drastically impair the ability of most websites to monetize content and acquire new customers, and would lead to low consent rates and severely restricted data access. Meta went even further in its submission, proposing to delete the entire Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive, the very provision that requires website operators to obtain clear user consent in the first place. Instead, the collection of so-called low-risk data should in future be possible without any consent at all.
In the end, the Council of the European Union silently removed Article 88b from the proposal. According to noyb, Google and individual member states, including France and Germany, had opposed the change while simultaneously calling publicly for a reduction in bureaucracy. The organization published a Google lobbying document opposing Article 88b and accused the company of arguing with far-fetched figures. On this, noyb stated: “Google is exaggerating wildly here and assumes there is a central kill switch for all advertising that doesn’t actually exist.”
Decision now lies with the European Parliament
Following the Council’s current position of June 18, 2026, the existing cookie banners will remain in place for now. According to noyb, this is likely to continue to cost European users a great deal of hassle and frustration. The campaign is now placing its hopes on the European Parliament, which has not yet taken a position and could, according to the organizations, revive the proposal. The campaign website lists the email addresses of the relevant members from the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) and the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) from each member state.
The organizations also argue on principle that cookie banners in their current form are not actually required by the GDPR, but are merely a consequence of the existing advertising model, in which websites depend on users waiving their own rights. According to their figures, up to 90 percent of users consent to the banners, even though only around 3 percent actually want to be tracked.
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