Three threads from the final days of Cannes Lions 2026 and the following days point to the same underlying question of who is in charge of advertising decisions. The EU Council removed Article 88b on June 18, 2026, a clause that would have allowed websites to use a browser-level or device-level signal to automatically express a user's consent preferences, after lobbying from Google. An estimated EUR 40 to 50 billion in annual programmatic advertising revenue flows through consent signals under the existing Transparency and Consent Framework. Meta quietly enrolled brands into an AI image tool without asking. In Prague, a campaign for satellite TV service Skylink was bought, placed, and completed by an AI agent with no human touching the transaction. Usercentrics surveyed 11,000 consumers across seven markets in March 2026 and found that one in four had cancelled a service over AI data concerns, while 52 percent said they would pay 7 percent more for a brand they trusted with their data.