> 4. When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.

It seems like the interesting question here would be what happens if the thing conditional on consent isn't the provision of service but rather something like waiving payment of a fee.

The reason this hasn't been offered historically is economic. There aren't enough people willing to pay to justify the effort, and the people who are willing to pay are also the best advertising targets, which means the fee would have to be high enough that hardly anyone would choose it.

But what happens now if they put a box on the site that says "pay $75 for this article or consent to be tracked and get it for free"?

It's the data protection authority that would make this judgement.

Citation needed.

EDIT: Am I really being downvoted for requesting a citation to a claim that seems to have no apparent/straight-forward basis in the law? What has this site became?

Chapter 6 of the law is all about the powers of the supervisory authorities, which are tasked with enforcing it.

But this is taken out of article 7 (chapter 2).

But it doesn't say so.

It's implicit. Regulations only mean what ever the regulator decides they mean.

Uh, doesn't the judge judge such things, when company X thinks it's compliant and the regulator thinks it isn't?

In most countries, regulators are given broad authority to issue supplementary rules, explaining exactly what's required or forbidden to comply with the original law. The goal is that people who know a lot about data privacy, rather than random EU representatives, can figure out the specifics.

Utmost care needs to be documented.