What I was getting at was that while yes, publishers can show a cookie-free site, many of them stopped doing exactly that. This started happening around the time the cookie regulation was implemented.

Had the regulation at least forbade this behavior, we most likely wouldn't be in this situation.

However, thinking back, I guess it's fair to say that publishers might have implemented this blocking behavior if the governments would only have done a public awareness campaign. In this case, only a minimum set of regulations (ban force acceptance of cookies for static content) would suffice as well.