consent or pay. transforming internet users from products into customers

The recognition in Meta that consent-or-pay models for online services are in principle lawful has caused concern that data protection and privacy are now only available to those who pay, whereas they should be fundamental rights. There is considerable attachment among lawyers to the pre-Meta idea that whether not personal data is provided should be a free decision, without any kind of financial pressure. However, this misunderstands the user-provider relationship and the reality of the internet. In practice, today, almost everyone provides personal data, because it is unrealistically difficult not to. If the law developed to the point where refusal was effective, this would probably cause many firms to introduce universal pricing. The idea that users can receive internet services without any counter-performance at all on their part is unrealistic, and indeed unfair. What Meta does is gives users the choice how they pay – with money or data. That represents progress on many fronts: it actually increases the possibilities for privacy protection; it brings coherence to the law, recognizing data provision as payment rather than an extra-contractual gift; it enhances the possibilities for competition since price differences mean more to consumers than differences in privacy policy; it increases the possibilities to rely on consumer law, which generally does not apply to free services; and it opens the door to constructive regulation of what are now standard purchase contracts from utility-like quasi-monopolies. This paper makes the argument above, and shows how the pre-Meta position led to bizarre consumer law problems, even after the recent revisions to several consumer directives to include data payment, and in practice led to users having hardly any control at all over their personal data.