The link tax is one thing, but I would say GDPR actually aids in price discovery, because without GDPR one side of the transaction has no idea what price they're paying.
It's possible some sites will switch to paid if they feel the targeted ads model in untenable. Others will just disappear, so in that sense there will be no price discovery.
0. The price anyone paid when their data was used was 0. There are 0 real-world negative consequences on anybody's personal lives due to their information being used by advertisers. They benefited for free.
I really wish I had enough karma to downvote this. Sure, using "free" ad funded services doesn't cost any money, but a price is still paid. Do you really think there is 0 possible consequences of every step you take both physical and virtual being persisted and replicated and mined ad infinitum? People think they pay with their attention, but they also pay with their privacy. Not the "my interests include fantasy football and romantic comedy" kind of privacy, but the "on June 4th I visited a gay bar 6 hours from home so no one would recognize me" kind. Then since you scrolled through Facebook while you were there, they start suggesting other people there as friends, and showing you ads based off of their interests.
Knowledge of who you associated with and what you do when no one you know is watching might not seem dangerous to you now in the western world living through the longest period of peace in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire, but that shit gets people killed. You don't have to look far back. You don't have to look far away either, shit happens today. How many people lost their lives in communist/fascist revolutions over the past century even, if only because "they associated with the enemy"? Can you imagine what the SS could have done with the kind of data that modern ad companies have?
