  Most websites offer their content for free, though this gratuity often comes
with a counterpart: personal data is collected to finance these websites by
resorting, mostly, to tracking and thus targeted advertising. Cookie walls and
paywalls, used to retrieve consent, recently generated interest from EU DPAs
and seemed to have grown in popularity. However, they have been overlooked by
scholars. We present in this paper 1) the results of an exploratory study
conducted on 2800 Central European websites to measure the presence and
practices of cookie paywalls, and 2) a framing of their lawfulness amidst the
variety of legal decisions and guidelines.
