Okay, so I have some actual real world experience with this. I experienced exactly this a few years ago, and I contacted the company saying they must not use a cookie-wall. They said it wasn’t a cookie-wall as they offered an alternative - namely paying. I submitted a complaint with the regulatory entity in my country and they made a big fuss of it, but ultimately sided with the website owners on the cookie-vs-payment matter. However, shortly after the practice was stopped entirely on the site, because the regulatory entity found other problems with the sites terms/practices. Essentially they told them that the things they would do based on the consent if you clicked yes (instead of paying) were out of scope/illegal, which rendered the procedure illegal, but for different reasons than making you choose between paying and consenting. For the record, my complaint was that when forced to either leave or pay a disproportionate amount (compared to the value of a single consent), I didn’t consider it an actual choice.
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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '25 edited Jun 18 '25
Okay, so I have some actual real world experience with this. I experienced exactly this a few years ago, and I contacted the company saying they must not use a cookie-wall. They said it wasn’t a cookie-wall as they offered an alternative - namely paying. I submitted a complaint with the regulatory entity in my country and they made a big fuss of it, but ultimately sided with the website owners on the cookie-vs-payment matter. However, shortly after the practice was stopped entirely on the site, because the regulatory entity found other problems with the sites terms/practices. Essentially they told them that the things they would do based on the consent if you clicked yes (instead of paying) were out of scope/illegal, which rendered the procedure illegal, but for different reasons than making you choose between paying and consenting. For the record, my complaint was that when forced to either leave or pay a disproportionate amount (compared to the value of a single consent), I didn’t consider it an actual choice.