A properly informed person would've understood that's what they'd do. They'd also probably realize cookies are not a big deal.

Tracking people around the web (especially without asking) is a big deal though.

Right the intention was to stop unchecked surveillance capitalism, now they use the normalcy of annoyance to wear you down such that you auto accept terms that you probably wouldn’t agree to if you read them. That’s what they want now.

This and other bad behavior will only go away when government says, “no this is predatory and you can’t do it” instead of saying “everything is OK if the user consents to it”.

Clicking a button could also not be a big deal, but yet here we are.

Which seems incredibly inefficient and expensive. I find it hard to believe.

Objective-C for the win!!

(They use @ for marking keywords)

Exactly this, which is the problem with all modern accounts. No person to talk to so you can understand what happened and maybe fix it.

They most definitely have a person to talk to. They're not the largest Google Cloud user by far, but they are large enough to have human account reps.

And those reps might not be told what the reason is.

Government officials should not be allowed to sign NDAs that provide benefits to companies.

This seems like the more likely reason. People wanted to give them money, but they didn't want to take it unless it was in a giant pile.

Yes but only not in the course of their federal duties.

Nope

They are lying about it not being a cost cutting exercise

That's exactly right. Bad leadership got them here. Of course they won't suffer, but their employees will. But only because they announced it as AI related. So the investors don't care.