Who decides these things? How is such a rule in favor of privacy? Why is my site where I regularly post news not eligible? Who decides which sites are eligible?
It’s these kind of moral double standards and cognitive dissonances that people have to endure. I wish it was black and white. But reality simply isn’t.
You can't even read news websites when you accept all the cookies, and then, oh surprise, you'd have to pay. But they installed the cookies nonetheless, those scammers.
What they seem to be exempt from is getting consent if they require the data for journalistic purposes.
IANAL, but I think they are simply not following the law and waiting for a definitive decision by a court.
ed: So I kept reading and from my understanding it's TBD whether the practice is lawful. The European Data Protection Board has issued an opinion against it a year ago.
> The scope of this opinion is indeed limited to the implementation by large online platforms
Separately, in the first couple of paragraphs, they basically complain that they don't like the alternative that platforms can legally implement of paywalls for all. :shrug: Which they may not like, but is legal. So consent or pay is essentially a realpolitik deal to not implement paywalls.
In the main, because the GDPR is an attack on advertising-supported services. You cannot build a business on context-free ads given they pay somewhere between 1/100 and 1/10000 as much as ads that profile.
Thus news orgs basically told regulators that the options were no free news (or realistically, the mess America is in, where real news orgs charge and the free ones are propaganda arms) or being allowed to do consent or pay. Because a paywall complies with all laws but has negative societal effects.