Websites are not required to give their content for free - a "Pay money or go away" popup is completely valid.
But websites are not allowed to track people who don't really want to be tracked. If the choice was "accept tracking or go away" then clicking "accept tracking" does not give them a legally valid consent to track me. There's nothing illegal about that popup as such, it's the tracking without consent that would be a violation.
Can you give me a link to some of these Austrian and German newspapers so that I can try out their approval pipeline? If that's really the case (all kinds of minor nuances may change the situation) then my intent is to click "accept", followed by a GDPR request of how they're using my data, and if their response indicates "consent" as the basis for processing something, then I'll submit a complaint to my local DPA (which may get resolved by the end of year..)
My point is that some EU companies still doing X is not a sign that X is permitted - often all it means that GDPR is not enforced for them yet. I see a lot of local practices that are still happening despite our local DPA clearly stating that this is not 'kosher' - it takes a lot of time to make all industries comply, there have been a lot of changes (mostly for the mass market companies handling offline customers, everything from hospitals to the rental markets to supermarket loyalty cards) but there's a lot of noncompliance out there. Every now and then another subindustry gets investigated (probably prioritized by the number of complaints) and after some action gets taken, all the other local companies in that industry tidy up somewhat.
But websites are not allowed to track people who don't really want to be tracked. If the choice was "accept tracking or go away" then clicking "accept tracking" does not give them a legally valid consent to track me. There's nothing illegal about that popup as such, it's the tracking without consent that would be a violation.
Can you give me a link to some of these Austrian and German newspapers so that I can try out their approval pipeline? If that's really the case (all kinds of minor nuances may change the situation) then my intent is to click "accept", followed by a GDPR request of how they're using my data, and if their response indicates "consent" as the basis for processing something, then I'll submit a complaint to my local DPA (which may get resolved by the end of year..)
My point is that some EU companies still doing X is not a sign that X is permitted - often all it means that GDPR is not enforced for them yet. I see a lot of local practices that are still happening despite our local DPA clearly stating that this is not 'kosher' - it takes a lot of time to make all industries comply, there have been a lot of changes (mostly for the mass market companies handling offline customers, everything from hospitals to the rental markets to supermarket loyalty cards) but there's a lot of noncompliance out there. Every now and then another subindustry gets investigated (probably prioritized by the number of complaints) and after some action gets taken, all the other local companies in that industry tidy up somewhat.