"Let's try a solution at the user & browser level." That's not enough. Only the website really knows what the cookies are actually being used for. That informa

"Let's try a solution at the user & browser level." That's not enough. Only the website really knows what the cookies are actually being used for. That information needs to be surfaced in a manner where customer preferences can be tailored. Trying to keep track of which cookie domains are used for cross-site tracking (which is what a user/browser level mechanism will max out to) becomes a big game of whack-a-mole. Cheap domains, endless supply of subdomains; IP address filtering can help, but there's a fair bit of collateral damage. We have P3P, but it's too much of an all-or-nothing thing. It's quite ardous for a website to implement correctly, and too easy to be unforthcoming with accurate information. But, we need to be able to understand the purpose of every cookie (and similar client-side storage mechanisms), and they need to be done in a way that tracking-related storage can be disabled without disrupting the storage related to the primary purpose of the site (from the customer's point of view). But the root cause of all this is that there are website owners who do not accept that their customers or visitors have a right to privacy. That perception needs to change for a viable solution to exist. It's a social issue, solving it in a technical manner runs into a similar set of issues that a legislative approach is currently doing.