[gpm]

My understanding, and the understanding of the EU commissioner [0], is that any amount is too high.

Consent must be freely given under EU law, not given in exchange for not having to pay money. You can't give a discount on the services for consenting.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/apple-google-and...

[toyg]

If that's the case, several European newspapers are also in breach. The latest iteration of paywalls typically state something like "we need money to survive, so you either buy a subscription or you agree to being tracked for advertising purposes".

On a certain level I agree with you: it goes against the spirit of the law and it's downright rude (effectively blackmailing readers).

This said, the alternative is that they go full-paywall (and risk death, when less than 1% of readers will actually bother to sign up).

[margana]

The news sites I frequent are doing something slightly different though. Some of them are detecting adblockers and give a similar popup saying "either you subscribe or turn off adblocker". This is fine as they don't force you to allow tracking, just seeing ads.

What you described may be out there as well, I just haven't stumbled on it personally.

[bcye]

In Germany, it is nearly never like that, and always about accepting profiling. You don't even get ad-free. You pay 3€ a month to not get profiling on one site, it's completely absurd.

[toyg]

I've just tested a few (gazzetta.it, repubblica.it, corriere.it) and they all trigger without adblockers. The text explicitly mentions profiling cookies.

[antoniojtorres]

It is indeed different, the interesting nuance is that the difference is permitting advertising interest based tracking vs non-personalized lower yield ads if you decline the cookie banner. It’s interesting to see that the money without serving personalized ads is not enough to keep publishers afloat, grim, at least for websites trying to offer ad supported content AND user choice

[niutech]

Newspapers aren't gatekeepers, unlike Meta.

[account42]

> This said, the alternative is that they go full-paywall (and risk death, when less than 1% of readers will actually bother to sign up).

Good. They'll be replaced with others that can either provide enough value that people don't mind paying for them or can reduce their costs to survive without tracking like they did before the Internet. Win/win either way.

[itopaloglu83]

Although I agree with the sentiment, I also would like to point of that newspapers existed before the internet and we had to pay for them despite having ads on them.

I don’t know how but at some point as a society we decided that we must tip a restaurant 25% after tax, but the newspapers aren’t worth a dime. I also don’t understand why they have to be all $25 per month now. I don’t think they were ever so profitable to being with.

[toyg]

> we had to pay for [newspapers] despite having ads on them

Absolutely. The main difference is that I could decide, day by day, whether I wanted to read newspaper A or B, or nothing at all; now I have to pledge monthly contributions to one paper, which are often very hard to cancel.

The industry cannot get their act together to solve microtransactions, and that's their doom; if a few major newspapers pooled together to, say, subsidize a browser feature that gives us back that model, they wouldn't be in the dire shape they're in now.

> at some point as a society we decided that we must tip a restaurant 25%

As an American society maybe, tips in Europe are not as common nor expected.

[account42]

a) Not all newspapers were paid.

b) If someone handed me a newspaper I was not expected to pay for it as well.

c) The newspaper dosn't fucking track you.