Digital Omnibus Stalls Again: No Council Mandate and No New Cookie Rules

Sunday was supposed to produce clarity on the EU Digital Omnibus. Instead, European marketers start Monday with the same practical answer they had last week: do not change anything yet.

MLex reported on 11 October that the Digital Omnibus package had been removed from Sunday’s Coreper agenda on Saturday evening. No new date was set and no revised text was prepared. The disagreement still centres on trade-secret protections in the Data Act part of the package.

The expected Sunday meeting was the second attempt to secure a Council negotiating mandate after the 7 October discussion stalled.

No mandate means there is still no Council position for negotiations with the European Parliament. It also means the cookie and advertising-measurement changes discussed in the October Council draft are not in force.

Evidence status: LIKELY. The agenda removal is based on MLex specialist reporting. NEMO found no Council adoption notice in the sources reviewed for the Monday desk.

For marketing teams, the useful update is simple: keep the draft on the planning desk, not in the CMP.

Monday status: no mandate and no new date

Item	Status now	What marketers should do
Council negotiating mandate	Not adopted	Do not describe the package as agreed
Next Coreper or Council date	Not published in the sources checked	Watch Presidency and Council agenda updates
Four-month cookie re-prompt	Draft only	Do not change refusal or re-ask settings
Contextual-ad measurement exemption	Draft only	Do not treat measurement as newly consent-free
BGH cookie-vendor case	Judgment scheduled for 17 December	Track separately from the Omnibus
Google Ads automated promotions	Live from 12 October	Treat as an ad-operations change, not an EU privacy-law change

Even if Coreper later adopts a negotiating mandate, that would authorise the Council Presidency to negotiate with Parliament. It would not rewrite ePrivacy or GDPR overnight.

The current stall is one stage earlier. There is not yet a Council mandate.

What does not change today

The safest operational decision is to leave current consent and measurement settings alone.

PPC Land’s 9 October walkthrough of the 2 October Council draft described changes that would matter to marketers if they survive the legislative process. They include a four-month minimum before asking again after a user refuses certain device access, and a proposed exemption for measurement of contextual advertising under defined conditions.

Those are useful planning signals. They are not current rules.

A consent platform should not be reconfigured because a draft discussed a shorter re-prompt interval. An analytics or ad-tech team should not remove consent requirements because a draft described a contextual-measurement exemption. And a publisher should not tell clients that “EU cookie rules changed on Sunday.”

The package did not receive the expected Sunday mandate.

Keep the draft checklist, but label it clearly

The October draft is still worth following because it shows where negotiations may be heading.

Draft issue	Planning question now	Current status
Four-month re-prompt after refusal	Which CMP rules would need changing if this survives?	Not law
Contextual advertising measurement	Which uses are genuinely contextual and non-profiling?	Not law
Consent-free device access purposes	Which current tags might fall inside a future exemption?	Not law
Personal-data wording	Which audience or analytics workflows depend on current definitions?	Not law
AI-related legitimate-interest wording	Which AI processing cases would need legal review?	Not law

Teams can map systems now so they are not starting from zero if a stable text eventually emerges. What they should not do is turn a draft checklist into a production change ticket.

Do not merge three different Monday stories

There are three cookie, advertising and measurement stories close together on the calendar, but they are not the same event.

First is the Digital Omnibus. Its current status is political and legislative: no Council negotiating mandate and no next date in the sources NEMO reviewed.

Second is Germany’s BGH case I ZR 5/26. The 8 October hearing produced no ruling. The court now lists a pronouncement date of 17 December 2026 at 08:45. That is a separate judicial track. NEMO will treat the judgment as its own Data & Measurement event.

Third is Google Ads automated promotions, live from 12 October for eligible advertiser accounts. That is an account-level advertising feature. It belongs in Performance, not in an ePrivacy update.

Keeping those tracks separate prevents a platform product change or court case from being repeated as evidence that EU legislation has already moved.

What marketing teams should do this week

Record current CMP refusal and re-prompt settings before anyone proposes a change. Keep a copy of the October draft checklist, but label every item “draft, not in force.”

For analytics and media teams, inventory measurement that depends on identifiers, local storage or similar device access. Separately identify genuinely contextual measurement. If the text advances later, that inventory will make legal review faster.

For communications teams, a safe summary is:

The Digital Omnibus did not receive a Council mandate on Sunday. The item was reported removed from the agenda, no new date has been announced, and the October cookie and measurement proposals remain draft.

Finally, watch for the next formal scheduling signal rather than trying to predict one. The current sources do not establish when Coreper will return to the file or whether a revised compromise will arrive first.

Claims NEMO will not make

NEMO is not treating any of the following as established:

that Coreper adopted the Digital Omnibus mandate on 11 October;
that the four-month cookie re-prompt rule is in force;
that contextual advertising measurement is now generally consent-free;
that a new vote date has been confirmed;
that the BGH delivered its cookie-vendor judgment;
that Google Ads automated promotions are part of the Omnibus or ePrivacy changes.

The Digital Omnibus still matters for European marketing operations. It just did not move in the way Sunday’s calendar suggested it might.