Its also malicious legislation. The EU could have easily wrote a line in the GDPR requiring companies to respect the Do Not Track header. But they chose not to. They also included various loopholes such as "legitimate interest". The legislation was just enough that it looks like they're doing something, without actually hurting the surveillance industry's bottom line too much.
The DNT header was devalued when Microsoft enabled it by-default in Internet Explorer, because it made it impossible for websites to determine if the DNT header was actually set by user-choice or not: any in-page cookie-consent popup that collected actual consent wouldn't change the DNT header sent by the browser, for example.
I honestly don't know if Microsoft in 2011 was doing this for unsurprising business reasons (e.g. as a ploy to hurt Google (AdSense was still all-the-rage), because it's good PR, because they had any genuine concern for their users' privacy, and to do anything to win-back market-share from Chrome and Firefox) - or if it was an intentional move to torpoedo the DNT header by showing how useless it is but only because they implemented it precisely so that it would be useless... but Microsoft wouldn't benefit from user-tracking over the Internet anywhere near as much as Google did/does/would-do.
In that case just like anti ad-blockers, the first thing we see on a page will be a very helpful guide to enable the opt-in header for that particular browser.
The EU is willing to force every user to go through an annoying browser ballot upon buying a new phone or computer, but can’t force the browser to include a DNT prompt up front if it’s that much of an issue?
Plus it’s not as if these companies weren’t willing to assume consent in the absence of the DNT flag. It sounds like a bit of BS to suddenly worry about what consent really means when it goes against their bottom line. I don’t see many hands being wrung about whether the user is meaningfully consenting when they click the easiest and most visible button to dismiss a banner that obscures a quarter of their screen.
