Cookies are living their last days (years). The upcoming ePrivacy Regulation will impose Web Browsers to ask users if they want to be tracked or not (so guess the answer). Apple will do this with its Safari browser right away (only 3% of the browser usage, but still).

So obviously the era of "marketing" or "tracking" cookies is reaching an end. This is not today, but within one or two years, this will be over.

Will the advertising industry be able to deal with this ?
Will ad networks be able to deal with this ?
Will web publishers, which are not selling their ad space directly, can deal with this?

I do not think that cookies are mandatory. Yes, they can be used to track, profile, "improve" ads, but ad networks should be able to propose cookie-free solution. After all, this is just an image/text, a link to a redirection page. Cookies are not needed to count impressions, or to credit the publisher for a click. But ad networks became so dependent of collecting data, will they be able to return to the basis, and to simple things ?