Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

My household still gets a physical paper (the Seattle Times), and a digital version of the same. We subscribe to the NYT and The Economist. That&#x27;s about our limit for news subscriptions.<p>I&#x27;m <i>not</i> going to fork over $10&#x2F;month to each of the other potential news sites for every article they publish. I have no idea why the Podunk Press and the Suburban Picayune Times even consider that as an option for out-of-area readers.<p>It&#x27;d be interesting to have a federated subscription model -- I&#x27;d pay an additional $X&#x2F;month for all of the rest of the newspapers, and they could share that. They&#x27;ll get nothing from me otherwise. Probably there is a business here (the tech to actually do it seems pretty straightforward, at first glance).

So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide.<p>Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.

The title is confusing click bait and the article content is garbage... &quot;intrusion attempt&quot;? &quot;master key&quot;?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;Vvztk6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;Vvztk6</a>

Could a startup go the Spotify&#x2F;streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors.<p>The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishers.<p>The problem would be surviving without being sued long enough to gain the traction and acceptance that Spotify has.<p>The real problem, of course, is that there are a billion different news organizations with independent paywalls and gateways. It&#x27;s a hassle to sign up for them all and completely unreasonable to expect that we should subscribe to all of them. Because they don&#x27;t have a federated micro transaction model in place, the solution is to come up with one for them and get them to adopt it. It&#x27;s better for both us and them, they just don&#x27;t know it yet.<p>Could it work?

There are going to be people complaining about the new requirement to have an account to view content.<p>To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don&#x27;t forget those who are willing to have a unique account.

Since the article doesn&#x27;t bother explaining the loophole being patched:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5google.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;15&#x2F;google-chrome-detect-incognito&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5google.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;15&#x2F;google-chrome-detect-incog...</a>

God, the tone of that article was nauseating. Google isn&#x27;t &quot;unlocking&quot; anything. They&#x27;re just fixing a loophole in incognito mode that shouldn&#x27;t have been there in the first place. And it&#x27;s not like that was the only option for this. When these &#x27;incognito detectors&#x27; first became viable, I just set up firefox where when you quit out it automatically cleared your entire history. So I would normally browse in Chrome, but then when I wanted to see paywalled contact I would just right click and open in Firefox.<p>Hopefully publishers will understand at some point that &quot;Only show a couple articles free&quot; is <i>not</i> a 100% technologically viable option. It will always be a cat-and-mouse game if that&#x27;s the behavior you&#x27;re going for.

I don&#x27;t see myself subscribing to any newspaper and paying $15+ per month for having a single source of news, usually with a single point of view and&#x2F;or bias.<p>I would much rather pay a fair amount (more or less $15-$30 per year, which is what I pay on my landline), and then subscribe to a number of them.<p>This for me looks like a more sustainable model, but I guess that&#x27;s not what their finance departments think.

News publishers should get their asses together in one building and build a &quot;netflix for news&quot;. No I don&#x27;t want to register or put my CC info at your US 10k town TV station with a single overworked dude managing IT just to follow a reddit link, but link yourself with a central ID provider that manages payment and does <i>not</i> disclose my personal data, and I&#x27;d be in for it.

Your local library probably provides content for free if they subscribe to news services, paid for with your tax dollars. Paywalls are just a tax on those too stupid to go to one.<p>Newspapers never made their money from subscriptions or from selling papers on the street. What kept newspapers in business was classified ads, which was disrupted as a revenue stream when Craigslist came around.

Why does Google not penalise them on search for this behaviour? Seems exactly against webmaster guidelines on hiding content or showing different content to a user and bot.

I feel for sites that provide a service that want to bring users in, and still offer them some content up front for free.<p>Having said that as a user I should be able to be anonymous at will too...

Just curious... does anyone know what the main workaround sites were using to detect incognito?<p>And if there are other likely ones the sites will be able to fall back to?

This might be a dumb question as someone who isn&#x27;t a pro on this topic but isn&#x27;t it really simple to just log the IP of the request for the article and meter it based on IP instead of cookies, browser fingerprinting, or however they are doing it now? Won&#x27;t that solve like 99.9% of the problem? I would imagine the amount of people that will rotate IPs just to read free articles is exceptionally small.<p>I suppose that might pose an issue with shared IPs at offices, for example. Also might cause a minor issue with people in the same household trying to read articles on the same site. But seems like a vast improvement over nothing at all, no?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iamadamdev&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-firefox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iamadamdev&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-firefox</a> (or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iamadamdev&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-chrome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iamadamdev&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-chrome</a> if you still use Chrome) generally works pretty well for me, at least for US-based news sources with paywalls.<p>As long as sites have &quot;backdoors&quot; around the paywall for SEO purposes, these types of extensions will work.

Don&#x27;t build your business model over a bug - I guess.

If your entire industry is only barely viable through the use of user-hostile tracking, I find it hard to feel bad when the ad tech loopholes are closed.

Is this update preventing publishers from identifying if a reader is accessing its site using Incognito mode, or is it preventing publishers from identifying who the reader is and whether they&#x27;ve reached their article limit? If the former, why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via Incognito mode a privacy issue? If the latter, why wouldn&#x27;t publishers just block all access to their site that is reached via Incognito mode?

If we&#x27;re talking about Chrome I&#x27;m guessing most of the target audience is on Android phones. Is it really not possible to use javascript on those phones to sufficiently fingerprint them for the purpose of metering? Webaudio, HTML5 Canvas, webgl, various timings, and probably a thousand other data points I don&#x27;t know about...<p>And doesn&#x27;t the clone army of iphones all essentially use Safari where the cookies still work?

Love the Washington Post screen shot. &quot;Private Browsing is permitted exclusively for our subscribers&quot;, which is a logical contradiction.

Opening with a Niall Ferguson quote doesn’t help the author’s credibility for people familiar with the history of that particular “historian.”

This is not the big deal that they are making it out to be, and I don&#x27;t expect it to have a huge impact on publishers.<p>The simple truth is that the people who will circumvent paywalls are usually the kind of people who would never subscribe anyhow.<p>If you are a publisher relying on detecting private mode to compel people to subscribe then you have a content problem - or a lack of marketing talent.<p>I say this as someone who has worked in 15+ years in publishing (web&#x2F;digital) and also with publishers and digital subscriptions (NYTimes and The New Yorker).

Newbie question: Would it work for publishers to key off of IP address instead of using cookies?

One of my problems is that even with the publications I subscribe to, I still get plenty of ads served up to me. This problem is especially acute with the NY Times, where their Android app seems to have an issue loading both ads and content efficiently.<p>I guess that this situation is a result of trying to find the right balance in pricing.<p>That said, if I was guaranteed ad-free content, I would subscribe to more publications than use incognito mode to get around soft paywalls.

I just close my browser (i have it set to delete all cookies on close) and reopen it. No need for incognito mode.<p>If there was a way to pay <i>once</i> for all sites i frequent to support them and at the same time <i>block the tracking</i>, I&#x27;d be interested.

This is a more general problem of sybil attacks.<p>Anyone can make unlimited accounts on a site, so users will need scarce tokens to begin with!

&gt; We tried to breach the paywalls of the publishers listed using Chrome’s current browser (v. 75), in Incognito Mode. Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented access to the content.<p>Intrusion attempt? Excuse me?

You could always just use a different browser, clear your cookies, or even just use another Google Chrome profile.

Why is this a bad thing? The tone of the author makes it seem like this is catastrophic. Is it?

Most of them (at least on mobile of what I know) already have a &quot;Click here to see full article&quot; button. This is where the paywall should be.<p>You start to read the article, it seems interesting ? You click (and then have to login, pay , or whatever).<p>Of course it might result of some sort of redacting bait, but why not try that ?<p>There&#x27;s a french tech website [0] that does that, some article are free to read (mostly brief content), but those where journalist have spent time on it, you can only see the begining, and if you are a paying customer, you see the whole content.<p>You can pay from 0.99€ for a 48h test, so you can see if the content is worthy for you.<p>(not affiliated at all, I just think they do this the good way)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nextinpact.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nextinpact.com&#x2F;</a>

&gt; As an unintended consequence of Google’s browser update, it is a very real possibility that a lot of publisher content would eventually disappear behind hard paywalls, and the open web would grow dark for many news consumers, with even darker consequences for publisher revenue streams.<p>Kind of disingenuous to talk of the open web in this context as what the publishers are trying to do it rather the opposite to putting the content on the open web (to the extent the term isn&#x27;t already taken for meaning building on public technologies).<p>The journalists and publishers need to get paid for their work of course, and running a proprietary, closed, pay-for-access service at the periphery of the open web can be justifiable. But I find the rhetoric here has a tinge of hypocrisy.

More content disappearing behind hard paywalls will expose a lot of publishers to the truth that very few people are interested in their content specifically, their link was just the first thing to come up about the subject in some aggregator.<p>The only reason I bypass paywalls is so I don&#x27;t have to be annoyed by them, go back to the page I came from, and choose the next option. If the aggregators I use stopped linking paywalled content entirely (or gave me a checkbox option), I wouldn&#x27;t even bother.<p>edit: there are outlets I donate to, and they don&#x27;t even have paywalls. This may sound weird, but I donate to orgs so they produce content that <i>other people</i> can read. People who want me to read their takes should really be paying me.

Should I expect Netflix to work on Incognito?

I don’t get it, this stuff is already behind a paywall already. There’s no darkening of the internet of news if news is already paywalled.<p>Looks like false controversy to me. All publishers have to do is demand a login and that’s it. Articles that are now behind a paywall will continue to do so.<p>There’s no difference that I can understand outside of a slight adjustment in paywall protection. Seriously can anyone explain what he’s going on about?

&quot;death of the metered paywall.&quot;?<p>I understand this is publisher-centric newspaper, but it&#x27;s not like it was that hard to bypass it.<p>If I remember right, Chrome had &quot;open guest window&quot; functionality forever, which bypasses the detectors as wll -- and it only took 4 clicks (select all, copy, open guest window, paste-and-go)<p>Sure 4 click -&gt; 1 click reduction is a big change, but it is hardly &quot;death of metered firewall&quot;

But how will we pay the NYT to try to drag the US into wars while David Brooks lectures debt-loaded millennials about work ethic and family values unless we let them continue to exploit a bug in web browsers?<p>Monopolist news orgs are losing readership&#x2F;revenue because they&#x27;re terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.

Haven’t we done this experiment enough times? When the publishers switch to hard paywalls their viewership tanks, their advertisers freak out, and they immediately roll it back. We’ve seen this in Europe we’ve seen this in the US when newspapers tried to force Google to stop indexing their content - turns out it is much better to allow Google to index. I expect to see a repeat here. All the paywalls do is send more revenue to the other guys. As long as their is one single source for content that’s not behind a paywall, no paywall will ever work. Furthermore most news outlets today focus on soft news and opinion pieces, and I really don’t care what tantrum some star or starlet is throwing, what else Donald Trump said that offended someone, who isn’t going to the Hamptons this summer, etc. It is news to someone but I’ll never spend a penny on it.

I hate paywalls. I rail a lot about my inability to adequately monetize my writing, but I want to put that information out there &quot;free to the public.&quot;<p>Ideals: They don&#x27;t seem to keep me fed.<p>But I&#x27;m not going to ever paywall my writing anyway.

Do I want sites to know I&#x27;m in private mode? Probably not. So paywalls will have to find a different way.

No. This isn&#x27;t about Google unlocking paywalls. This is about Google fixing a bug where the presence of Icognito Mode could be detected with JS which is totally against the premise of Incognito Mode whose purpose it is to be undetected, not to be detected as somebody wanting to be undetected.<p>Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content. Then none of this applies.

They should think hard about their next move because all that these paywalls have done is make it so I don&#x27;t read their articles, and I don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;m missing anything. Maybe I&#x27;m the only one? I&#x27;m definitely not signing up to read them either.

real hard paywalls should block crawlers, and no one would index and find these articles, leading to even greater loss, because no one will reach these sites in the first place

&gt; Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented access to the content<p>Using incognito mode in the browser to make it a bit harder to be tracked (without even blocking ads!) is &quot;an intrusion attempt&quot;? Excuse me? That&#x27;s absurd language.

This entire system is just borked. And part of it, is why fake-news spread so easily, since people can&#x27;t read on newspapers without having to pay for it (which should be fine) but in poor countries, people are not paying for this and end up relying on low quality news sites, which are filled with fake and click bait stuff that gets shared on whatsapp all the time.<p>Hard paywalls will just make even less people to read sites like nyt, wp, wsj and their revenue will probably go even down.<p>subscribe to read? no way. my modus operandi is that if I get to a link and it asks for a login or to subscribe, I just close the tab. there&#x27;s a few websites that I don&#x27;t even click anymore because of that.. and the list just keeps growing to me.

NYT already blocks you from reading articles when you’re in incognito.

Is this not anti-competitve? I don&#x27;t know Google&#x27;s share of the browser market but this action feels like tearing down a merchant stand at the farmers market. These firewalls are how publishers display their prices and establish a good faith &quot;sample&quot; of the work. If this goes to trial I can see myself on the side of publishers.