No permission is required for cookies that are needed to make a website work.

Cookie dialogs are solely the contribution of those who want to keep tracking you but aren't allowed to do so without your consent.

The EU’s own website has the same banner message asking for analytic cookies, it’s just a poorly designed and executed regulation like many in the EU revolving around tech.

Often repeated, always wrong.

In your estimation what is the EU’s greatest contribution?

Longest period of peace in Europe seems like a pretty big achievement, even if many of us don't even know what it's like to live through wars in Europe. On a smaller scale, having a single currency, no roaming fees, traveling and working everywhere without worrying about tourist or a working Viswa is pretty big too.

Easy to forget about many of these things as we just take these as a given baseline.

https://european-union.europa.eu/achievements_en

It was implied through GP that the topic was “greatest contribution to technology”

Those are put there by the websites, not the EU.

They are put there by websites in reaction to the poorly thought out and executed EU regulations, which is par for the course for the EU.

The official EU website has the same popup asking about required or optional (read: tracking) cookies that every website does.

Clearly this isn’t the websites fault if the EU’s own website is displaying the same pointless banner to comply with their poorly executed regulation.

Yep it’s been great to see the sites that try and track me vs them just doing it without me knowing.