If your organisation has been holding off on cookie consent work because “the EU is about to fix this with a browser signal,” the version of the Digital Omnibus currently on the table says otherwise.
What Article 88b would have done
The Commission’s original November 2025 proposal introduced Article 88b as a structural alternative to the cookie banner: browsers would carry a standardised, machine-readable signal expressing a user’s tracking preference, websites would be required to read and honour it, and the need for a separate consent pop-up on every site a person visits would fade out over time. It was framed as the fix for banner fatigue that GDPR’s original drafters never delivered.
What the Council did with it
In its position paper dated 18 June 2026, the Council removed Article 88b from the Digital Omnibus text entirely. Reporting attributes the push for removal to Germany, France and Poland, following a lobbying campaign against the browser-signal approach that noyb, the European privacy advocacy group, has characterised as advertising-industry pressure winning out over the preference the majority of EU citizens have expressed for fewer, not more, consent prompts. The Council’s position is a negotiating stance, not final law. The European Parliament has not yet set its own position, which leaves the browser-signal mechanism, and the future shape of the cookie banner, unresolved rather than dead.
What does survive, and why it will not feel different yet
Article 88a, which does remain in the text, moves cookie and tracking-technology rules out of the ePrivacy Directive and into the GDPR itself, and it is not purely cosmetic. It adds a closed list of consent-free exemptions, limited to essential cookies, first-party audience measurement and security purposes, and it requires that a refusal be as easy as acceptance, specifically a single-click reject button, with a six-month cooldown before a site can ask the same user for the same consent again. Osborne Clarke’s analysis of the draft is blunt about what this does and does not fix: the exemptions are narrow enough, and the technical standards for any future machine-readable consent signal far enough off, that a rapid end to the cookie banner as European users currently experience it remains unlikely. If you operate a website reaching EU visitors, the practical guidance has not changed: keep investing in a compliant consent management setup, do not architect around a browser-signal future that has not been agreed, and make sure your reject flow is already down to one click, because that requirement is not the part still being negotiated.
If you need your cookie consent implementation reviewed against the single-click reject and re-consent cooldown requirements, or want a second opinion on which of your current data collection practices will and will not survive the narrower Article 88a exemptions, contact Excello Digital. We help European businesses keep their consent management compliant while the underlying law is still moving.