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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

It's obviously not a "request" if they're making legal threats. And it's not payment they're demanding, it's the ability to track anybody who visits their site, whether or not you agree to be tracked. And it's not part of any social contract I agreed to; the (very short) history of the web is an ongoing negotiation. Paywalls were invented this decade. This plugin is part of that negotiation.

Browsers already have a mechanism for authorizing access to content. Many mechanisms, really. If a company chooses to use an unreliable mechanism, I don't think we are morally obligate to roll over and do what they want.

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This is mostly about "soft" paywalls, allowing you to read maybe a dozen articles per month without paying.

There is currently no way I know of allowing this functionality that is meaningfully "reliable". At least not without erecting new barriers such as mandatory registration (and verification).

So you, and everyone else, seem to be demanding publishers just switch to "absolute paywalls". You will then have strictly less access than before.

How is that supposed to be better?

Prohibiting paywall bypass software violates the principle that the client dictates how web pages are rendered, or requires carving out a special exception just for the publishing industry.

Viewed under a magnifying glass, it seems like a good thing to ensure the publishing industry can use soft paywalls, but taking a broader view, I think that breaks the web. I don't think soft paywalls are worth breaking the web, and even more broadly, governments should only regulate what users can do with data willingly sent to their computers in very exceptional circumstances.

This seems to be a classic example of an argument in which the ends don't justify the means (the means being allowing the lawsuits, the ends being publishers switch to "absolute paywalls")

It may mean that without a harsh letigious method, publishers do not offer "soft paywalls". It's more likely they will continue to do so to not be shut out of the market, AND we won't have waves of frivolous harsh lawsuits bankrupting independent developers.

The alternative you're proposing is to in effect be held to ransom by content providers - your argument could equally be made for any form of drm or appeasement (without root how do we know you are not recording this, wothout your location how do we know you are within our licensing area, without direct retinal scans how do we know who is really watching, etc)

Ideally, it would hasten society’s realization that the flow of information should not be subjected to capitalism.

I agree but unfortunately in reality information costs money to discover.

I'm not demanding publishers switch to anything. Personally, I like the soft paywall system. I also think people who bypass it were never going to pay money, so I think publishers freaking out about people opening up an incognito window are wasting their time.

But if publisher do want absolute control over who views their content, then they should make people log in. I think that would be a mistake, but it's their mistake to make. I'm just opposed to give them legal control over what I do with my computer and any data their servers freely give me.

> Paywalls were invented this decade.

Compuserve paywalled all of their content way back in the 1980s.

Sorry, I specifically mean the "soft" paywall, which is the kind at issue here. If these publishers had required people to log in, no browser extension could bypass that.

> Paywalls were invented this decade.

Paywalls were used in adult industry even before the 2000's.

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