Comment by fc417fc802

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.