Wait till mid 2019 when EU countries will actually start enforcing it. Unofficially there is a change period so probably no one will really be touched by it in the first year.
I've noticed quite a few US sites, particularly some large news orgs, have been going the "accept this or leave" route, and some are going the "accept this or click on the entrance to our insane maze of links that will confuse you until you give up"
They are non-compliant, guess we'll see what happens.
If someone is working for free on a voluntary basis, they're probably not being "exploited". When I was trying to build a startup, I got plenty of free help from various friends and interested parties who were excited about what I was building - but nothing on the level of employee-level work. Hell, if someone was remotely useful and willing to put in real hours, I'd have called them co-founders and given them equity, happily.
This is important! If someone has enough skills/ambition to be actually useful to an early stage startup, they can make better money elsewhere. So if they're putting in their time with the startup, they're being motivated by something else. That doesn't mean they're being exploited. It means their interests can't be measured entirely in dollars.
Are they getting equity? Experience? Networking? Fun?
As long as they feel like they're getting something useful from the experience, then I don't think "exploited" is the right word. And if they think they're not getting anything out of it, it begs the question just how that early stage startup is going to make them stick around. Exploitation involves more stick, less carrot.
WA is also practically non-existent in Denmark. If someone is one WA they are either an ex-pat or have lived extensive time abroad and have friends / family they keep in touch with.
Here we also have unlimited texting in all but the most limited pay-as-you-go offerings. The telco market is extremely competitive.
I think for many companies at least it's just the easiest way to somehow approximate value created for the customer. When the business matures one could argue that services should gain a stronger measurement of value created for their customers and charge correlating to this.
With regards to the SMB scenario I agree - and probably it would make sense for many services to have a base bundle tier with 5 or so accounts. And then price it based on some minimum value created. But also hard to do this if your competition is offering 1 user for $2.99.
