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by fc417fc802 426 days ago
That's not entirely fair. The concept of duress exists and is always at odds with consent in a transactional setting. The issue is where to draw the boundary between "you freely chose to do business" and "you were coerced into accepting unfavorable terms".

I'm inclined to think that "pay or be tracked" is usually the former. The issue was never that I shouldn't have to pay but rather that I wasn't given the choice in the first place.
1 comments
immibis 426 days ago
That would probably work if it wasn't already such an established business model. The grocery store hires a bouncer to not let me in unless he can take a picture of my ID? Fine... I'll go across the street.

But since it already is established that the Internet works this way, all grocery stores in town are already doing this. I might not want to but I still have to. Moreover, it's been firmly impressed upon everyone that they have to show ID to enter a grocery store, so if I created a new one that didn't, people would just continue going to their closest one anyway. To improve this situation, something more drastic than free competition is needed (if that could work, it already would have).

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fc417fc802 426 days ago
In this analogy the grocery stores pretty much all started offering the option to pay a cover charge and not have your ID checked. They believed this complied with the new laws but the regulator is making noises that this isn't good enough - that they have to make ID checks optional even for customers that won't pay.

So the question is, does charging you to not have your ID checked count as coercion or is it a voluntary choice? Or alternatively, does it have a detrimental effect on society at large? Is it somehow unfair to the individual? I'd tend to think that the answer to those questions would depend a lot on motivations - the funding model, the size of the fee, and how much money they make if they track you.

In the case of a newspaper they have to make money somehow. If readers aren't willing to pay I don't immediately see how offering a free tier that has advertisements with tracking is detrimental to society or unfair to the individual.

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