Brussels, Belgium, 23rd February 2026 – IAB Europe welcomes the European Commission’s ambition to simplify the EU digital acquis through the Digital Omnibus proposal. Reducing regulatory fragmentation, addressing consent fatigue, and providing greater legal certainty are essential to strengthening Europe’s digital economy while maintaining high standards of data protection.
As the legislative process advances, IAB Europe’s position paper calls on co-legislators to ensure that simplification efforts are grounded in a genuinely risk-based approach. The position paper encourages the co-regulators to:
Legal certainty around what constitutes personal data is fundamental to the effective functioning of the GDPR. IAB Europe supports efforts to align the interpretation of identifiability with a recent Court of Justice of the European Union ruling (EDPS v SRB), ensuring that assessments of whether data is personal are realistic, contextual, and based on practical means available to a given organisation. Clear boundaries around identifiability will incentivise responsible investment in privacy-enhancing technologies and pseudonymisation techniques. This approach supports innovation while maintaining strong protections for individuals.
IAB Europe strongly supports the objective of reducing consent fatigue for European consumers. However, true simplification requires addressing the structural causes of banner proliferation. The current framework often requires consent for low-impact, operational uses of data that pose minimal privacy risk. A more proportionate, risk-based approach would allow essential digital functions to operate under appropriate safeguards, reserving consent for higher-impact processing.
At the same time, the European Commission’s proposal for a centralised or browser-level consent mechanism is technically unworkable and poses a severe economic risk to ad-funded services. Decoupling consent from the direct relationship between users and service providers would prevent providers such as publishers from explaining the specific value exchange that funds free content and services. This is particularly damaging to independent and smaller publishers, as well as competing digital service providers, who rely on direct engagement with their audiences to sustain their business models. Weakening these foundations risks reducing revenues and ultimately limiting consumers’ ability to access free content and services.
For more information, you can access the full position paper under this link.
