You are very wrong about politicians' motivations though. Those cookie policies never had any of the stated purposes. They're not to improve privacy, nor are they about fairness in any way.

Google/FB are starting to determine the outcome of elections, and politicians inflict punishment on them to ... get them to influence elections. Surprise !

What really set this of, however is Google's support for Hillary Clinton. A third of the top of Google's management went to work 100% for Hillary Clinton (Eric Schmidt), and created effectively a department of Google working only to get her elected. And then ... let's just say he failed to deliver what was promised.

So then the companies were in the worst possible position. The government that got elected was very mad at them for working against them, and the government that lost (but was still in power) was VERY mad them for their failure.

This is the result.

In the EU Google (and FB, and Twitter, but especially Youtube) keeps and keeps and keeps exposing the real intentions of politicians. Mostly accidental, because they're surfacing real information that normally wouldn't make it anywhere.

When the French state decided to "evict" the "Calais jungle". Sounds so innocent doesn't it ? Youtube showed what it really was. Police went in, a central cordon surrounded by machine gun fire that set refugee's tents and houses on fire ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53uBTn3tBEo

And when the EU decided that "the right to be forgotten" was needed (I'm sure it was a complete coincidence that the then-president of the EU commission, Jose Manuel Barroso (I met the guy, he's a serious asshole who makes Trump look as gracious as a ballerina), the only institution with absolute lawgiving power in the EU) started his career organizing terrorist attacks for communist youth parties in a Portugese university (note: I'm not against leftists. But read what this guy did ... he played Gestapo chief for a decade. Beating people into year-long hospital stays because he lost an argument).

And then Google decided to sabotage this effort, in a number of ways ... And surprise ! Suddenly privacy is REALLY important !

When the Belgian youth services had 2 grandparents arrested for fleeing from youth services with a kid, then left the kids behind in a mental institution in Zagreb, Facebook surfaced this article to half of Belgium. A private individual (a reporter/presenter) (NOT child services, they just left the kids there. 2 and 4 years old, left alone in a mental institution) managed to convince the country to release the children and she brought them back to their parents. No further news.

When Norway's child expert council's chair Jo Erik Brøyn (this council decides on children being taken away from their parents "for their protection") was convicted (VERY lightly) for "using child porn for 20 years", again the article was surfaced and exposed to lots of people. The government decided to protect the name of this porn-using child psychiatrist (And failed, his name is "Jo Erik Brøyn") (The Norwegian government child services expert "Thore Langfeldt" testified in court, on government paid time of course, that "there is no evidence to suggest that people who download child pornography are more likely than anyone else to commit other offences against children") (note that the child-porn psychiatrist Jo Erik Brøyn also used Barnevernet, the Child Protection Service of Norway to get 2 Indian children as his own. Needless to say, Norway's CPS did not see any need to take those children away from a convicted sex offender). Again articles about this were widely circulated by Google and FB (and this one has a bit of a resurgence at the moment)

Oh, and in the UK it was exposed that Her Majesty's government has private companies getting paid for child placements, opening up accusations of child trafficking. Weirdly, several such companies doing these adoption placements of children taken away from their parents "for their own protection" are valued at tens of millions of pounds ...