> Germany is pretty hopelessly behind on everything except GDPR enforcement.
Are you sure? I see major outlets in Germany blatantly violating the GDPR by forcing visitors to pay with their privacy or pay with their money. That is not allowed. It is perfectly fine to have a paywall, but you can never have people pay with their privacy.
Are you sure they are in violation? Because it only takes one customer to trigger expensive lawsuits. And there are a lot of very eager and trigger happy lawyers in Germany specializing in that sort of thing. A lot of people make bad assumptions about what is and isn't legal/allowed and a lot of companies have gotten good at finding the grey area of stuff that probably won't get them into trouble.