Now look what happened when the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) began asking visitors to its website if it could drop cookies on their computer, as the new EU legislation requires:

The data was collected by market researcher Vicky Brock, who put in a Freedom Of Information request to the ICO, asking how much traffic measured by Google Analytics had fallen since the ICO put the explicit opt-in on its website. The answer: about 90%.

Needless to say, these new rules could have a catastrophic impact on the web publishing industry. If websites can’t reliably tell how many people are coming to their sites, and advertisers can’t tell where their customers are coming from, the entire web advertising model collapses overnight. It’s no exaggeration to say that could send many web publishers to the wall.

There are a couple of caveats to this rather grim scenario. The ICO took the nuclear option of putting a very noticeable – and rather alarmingly worded – warning at the top of its homepage. (It’s still on the ICO website if you want to see for yourself.) However, it’s still not clear if websites will be forced to be that explicit about the relatively innocent data they’re collecting. Indeed, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has (somewhat confusingly) suggested you might not even need to get prior consent to collect such data.

One thing is clear: the Information Commissioner will need to issue much clearer guidance to website owners than the muddy advice it has already offered, which was rightly criticised by my colleagues Davey Winder and Kevin Partner.

If the ICO is genuinely expecting the internet industry to follow its example, it’s going to take down a lot of web businesses with it.

But by jingo it has, at least if today’s news story (Microsoft to offer browser choice with Windows 7) is to be believed. During installation, you’ll get the choice of five (Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari), rendering the EU’s objection of Microsoft exploiting its monopolistic position irrelevant.

“Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Microsoft Corp.

So, you’ll still need to go through the hassle of downloading your browser before you can actually use it, but it should also mean that we can avoid this stupidness of having no way to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 (as exclusively revealed by PC Pro many weeks ago).

At the moment the proposal is lighter on detail than Sarah Palin’s plan to get elected President of the USA, and perhaps it’s unfair to expect anything more than broad statements at this stage, but you have to ask how we’ve got to within eight weeks of Windows 7 going on the shelves without this being sorted out.

Until Microsoft updates its code to incorporate this new “choice of browser” proposal – and bear in mind this could take months – anyone in the EU who upgrades their Vista machine to Windows 7 will have to go through the pain and hassle of a full reinstallation, possibly losing all their applications in the process.

So yes, I applaud this latest move by Microsoft. But it’s many months too late.

While the EU has indeed made progress, we’re a long way from popping the champagne corks and declaring a famous consumer victory.

Look, for example, at the data rates. The EU’s new rules still allow mobile networks to charge up to 1 Euro (86p) per MB for data downloads when roaming. That’s £880 per GB! To put that in perspective, BT charges £15.65 per month for a 10GB data download allowance on its Option 1 package; mobile networks can theoretically charge £8,806 for the same amount of data! And I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence that the costs associated with mobile data are an order of magnitude higher than they are for fixed line providers.

You might also want to reflect on the charges for SMS text messages. While the EU has now capped the cost of text messages to 9p (down from 24p), that’s still 9p for transferring only 140 bytes (0.000133514MB) of data. That’s a princely £674 per MB.

Dr Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester last year claimed that sending texts from a mobile phone was four times more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Telescope, and that was based on an average text message fee of only 5p.

So while the EU can take some satisfaction from today’s price cuts, mobile data prices are literally still out of this world.