
Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30 - Isofarro
https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/google-unlocks-33-of-publisher-paywalls-on-july-30-this-is-what-happens-next/
======
kabdib
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's about
our limit for news subscriptions.

I'm _not_ going to fork over $10/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.

It'd be interesting to have a federated subscription model -- I'd pay an
additional $X/month for all of the rest of the newspapers, and they could
share that. They'll get nothing from me otherwise. Probably there is a
business here (the tech to actually do it seems pretty straightforward, at
first glance).

~~~
vulpes
This is Apple's News+ in the nutshell, so federated subscription service
you're envisioning would have to compete with Apple.

~~~
kabdib
Yup, you're right. I feel stupid now :-)

edit: apparently you have to use apple devices? oh heck no, what were they
_thinking_?

~~~
dredmorbius
Apple sells hardware.

That's what they're thinking.

------
liability
So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news
does everything they can to spread far and wide.

Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.

~~~
hyperbovine
No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies
squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care
that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content.
Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of
our times, is left to you to decide.

~~~
beatgammit
I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having
subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help
because it makes payments easier.

An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news.
I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally,
those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy,
and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.

I had a subscription to The Economist for a little while, but I found that I
still read other news sources and only read a handful of Economist articles. I
want quality journalism, but having subscriptions to every source I trust is
cost prohibitive and no single source has everything I want. I want a curated
set of high quality articles for a constant price.

~~~
m463
> I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier.

Taler should allow anonymous payments, which means a possibility of one fix to
the present model: you can read the news without the news reading you.

~~~
mcny
Taler from what I understand does not require full details to be shared with
the tax man, only agregates. That being said I don't think taler is anonymous
at all.

~~~
m463
I was told Taler is anonymous - for the customer.

------
aorth
The title is confusing click bait and the article content is garbage...
"intrusion attempt"? "master key"?

~~~
ungzd
What is even more ironic is that it has anti-adblocker.

~~~
DangitBobby
Which can be circumvented by sophisticated hacking techniques such as pressing
escape before the page finishes loading all the bullshit

------
Willson50
[https://outline.com/Vvztk6](https://outline.com/Vvztk6)

~~~
JeanMarcS
Thanks for that

------
echelon
Could a startup go the Spotify/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.

The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and
do a revenue share with the original publishers.

The problem would be surviving without being sued long enough to gain the
traction and acceptance that Spotify has.

The real problem, of course, is that there are a billion different news
organizations with independent paywalls and gateways. It'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'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's better for both us and them, they just don't know it yet.

Could it work?

~~~
rayiner
Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies
specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better
for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage,
like Apple does with the App Store.

~~~
echelon
> The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple
> does with the App Store.

That's a great point and speaks to a true danger with this model.

I imagine content publishers could distribute their content across multiple
distributors if they existed, though I imagine the market would only support a
handful of competitors.

> Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies
> specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested. How was this
provision created, and did they start their business with a law team? How were
they able to get this accepted? What about other, earlier entrants in this
space? Grooveshark obviously failed (they walked a slightly shadier path), but
had they tried to get on proper legal footing they might have made it.

Could a news aggregator start out as a Grooveshark, then pivot into a Spotify
without getting sued into oblivion?

~~~
dehrmann
> Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested.

I think they're thinking of DMCA radio licensing. This is what Pandora, not
Spotify uses/used, and why you can't play specific tracks on Pandora.

------
qmarchi
There are going to be people complaining about the new requirement to have an
account to view content.

To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login.
Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don't forget those who are willing to have a
unique account.

~~~
eli
As a publisher, there's absolutely no way I'm letting Google, Apple or
Facebook manage the identity or control the authentication of my readers.

~~~
drivingmenuts
Why not? Saves you the trouble of building and maintaining a secure access
system. You likely gain more users because of network effects, which doesn’t
cut your advertising budget so much as supplements it. If your trying to
preserve user privacy, there’s a good chance you’re too late there - they most
likely already gave that up a long time ago.

~~~
eli
My relationship with my readers is our most valuable asset, and I don't want
it mediated by companies who compete with me for ad dollars. It's the same
reason I publish content on our own domain and not Medium or Facebook or
LinkedIn.

------
kerblang
Since the article doesn't bother explaining the loophole being patched:

[https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-
incog...](https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incognito/)

~~~
z2
And so starts the next stage of the cat-and-mouse game: for instance detecting
if the Incognito-allotted RAM filesystem is unrealistically small:
[https://9to5google.com/2019/07/23/researcher-discovers-
new-w...](https://9to5google.com/2019/07/23/researcher-discovers-new-way-
detect-chrome-incognito-mode/)

------
hn_throwaway_99
God, the tone of that article was nauseating. Google isn't "unlocking"
anything. They're just fixing a loophole in incognito mode that shouldn't have
been there in the first place. And it's not like that was the only option for
this. When these 'incognito detectors' 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.

Hopefully publishers will understand at some point that "Only show a couple
articles free" is _not_ a 100% technologically viable option. It will always
be a cat-and-mouse game if that's the behavior you're going for.

~~~
readams
Cookie Autodelete on FireFox is really great; it automatically clears cookies
and local storage as soon as you navigate away.

~~~
Marsymars
Also see the Temporary Containers extension.

------
ameixaseca
I don'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/or
bias.

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.

This for me looks like a more sustainable model, but I guess that's not what
their finance departments think.

~~~
Traster
I'm always shocked when I consider the cost of these things. Each newspaper
provides a relatively tiny amount of differentiated content and then each of
them want more than a netflix subscription a month? How in the hell do those
costs compare?

------
mschuster91
News publishers should get their asses together in one building and build a
"netflix for news". No I don'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 _not_ disclose my personal data, and I'd be in for it.

~~~
mic47
We had this in Slovakia ([https://piano.io/](https://piano.io/) ), but it was
not very successful, and all media companies now have their own systems. But
they seems to expand to other markets.

I think that their main problem was that at the same time, the subscription
was low (so didn't bring much revenue) and at the same time people hated it
because now they had to pay for something that was free before. So I guess
once we get used to pay for journalism, then something like netflix for media
might work.

------
riffic
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.

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.

~~~
waqf
I think you mean that paywalls are rent-seeking on those who lack _time_ (or
some other resource) to go to a public library.

~~~
riffic
That's a much better way to phrase this idea, thank you.

------
jwmoz
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.

~~~
creato
Google penalizing publishers for something, legitimate or not, sounds like a
good way for google to get another few billion in fines from the EU.

------
duxup
I feel for sites that provide a service that want to bring users in, and still
offer them some content up front for free.

Having said that as a user I should be able to be anonymous at will too...

~~~
vorpalhex
You can still offer people content for free and also not be defeated by
incognito. Offer regular news articles for free, and make premium editorials
and analysis require a (reasonably priced) subscription.

But anecdotally, news orgs will never get my money while their subscription
terms continue to be asinine. I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year
for access. I will not play these $X/week for odd week increment games.

~~~
shusson
> while their subscription terms continue to be asinine

Agreed. The only official way to cancel a NYT subscription is to call them.
Infuriating.

~~~
glerk
Same with the Economist. They must have crunched some numbers and determined
this is more profitable.

I usually “unsubscribe” from these kind of services by changing my credit card
to an empty prepaid one and let the payment bounce.

~~~
axxl
With the Economist you can at least do it via email, or if you’re doing
digital only you can use a subscription via Apple’s in app purchases etc and
manage it that way.

------
crazygringo
Just curious... does anyone know what the main workaround sites were using to
detect incognito?

And if there are other likely ones the sites will be able to fall back to?

~~~
woogley
TFA links to this in the first sentence: [https://www.blog.google/outreach-
initiatives/google-news-ini...](https://www.blog.google/outreach-
initiatives/google-news-initiative/protecting-private-browsing-chrome/)

Basically, attempting to use FileSystem API but getting an Error === Incognito

------
turc1656
This might be a dumb question as someone who isn't a pro on this topic but
isn'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'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.

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?

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
No, mobile providers change your IP all the time, and these days most (or
nearly most) news content is read on a mobile device.

~~~
turc1656
Ah, good point. Wasn't thinking of mobile because I'm in the minority on news
consumption. I do pretty much all of it from a desktop/PC.

------
skrowl
[https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox) (or
[https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
chrome](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome) if you still use
Chrome) generally works pretty well for me, at least for US-based news sources
with paywalls.

As long as sites have "backdoors" around the paywall for SEO purposes, these
types of extensions will work.

------
guhcampos
Don't build your business model over a bug - I guess.

------
rhinoceraptor
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.

~~~
52-6F-62
Like Google?

------
eappleby
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'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't publishers
just block all access to their site that is reached via Incognito mode?

~~~
playpause
It's the former.

> why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via
> Incognito mode a privacy issue?

Because it makes Incognito less useful, and Incognito is a tool for people to
control their privacy.

Anyway, Incognito isn't only used for anonymous browsing. For example, a user
might use an Incognito window to register on a shopping site, providing all
their personal details, just because they don't want Facebook to see their
activity on this third party site (and they don't want to bother signing out
of Facebook in their main browser context). So it's reasonable to consider "is
using Incognito mode" to be private information.

------
jancsika
If we're talking about Chrome I'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't know about...

And doesn't the clone army of iphones all essentially use Safari where the
cookies still work?

------
stubish
Love the Washington Post screen shot. "Private Browsing is permitted
exclusively for our subscribers", which is a logical contradiction.

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

~~~
panzagl
Niall Ferguson is a historian, what makes you think otherwise?

~~~
literallycancer
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Opinions_and_re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Opinions_and_research)

~~~
panzagl
Believe it or not, historians are supposed to have opinions.

------
donohoe
This is not the big deal that they are making it out to be, and I don't expect
it to have a huge impact on publishers.

The simple truth is that the people who will circumvent paywalls are usually
the kind of people who would never subscribe anyhow.

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.

I say this as someone who has worked in 15+ years in publishing (web/digital)
and also with publishers and digital subscriptions (NYTimes and The New
Yorker).

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

~~~
paxswill
Large scale NAT is one reason that would fail. Some mobile carriers have most
of their customers behind a handful of IPs. Wikipedia has dealt with this a
lot, and has a page explaining why conflating an IP address to a person isn't
usually the way to go.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not_people)

------
unclesams-uncle
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.

I guess that this situation is a result of trying to find the right balance in
pricing.

That said, if I was guaranteed ad-free content, I would subscribe to more
publications than use incognito mode to get around soft paywalls.

------
Tepix
I just close my browser (i have it set to delete all cookies on close) and
reopen it. No need for incognito mode.

If there was a way to pay _once_ for all sites i frequent to support them and
at the same time _block the tracking_ , I'd be interested.

------
EGreg
This is a more general problem of sybil attacks.

Anyone can make unlimited accounts on a site, so users will need scarce tokens
to begin with!

------
vman81
> 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.

Intrusion attempt? Excuse me?

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

------
bob_theslob646
Why is this a bad thing? The tone of the author makes it seem like this is
catastrophic. Is it?

~~~
gtirloni
It's great for users because their privacy is improved in incognito mode.

It's bad for publishers but not catastrophic.

The tone of this article was very alarmist. The author says opening incognito
is an "intrusion attempt". That's not what this means.

------
JeanMarcS
Most of them (at least on mobile of what I know) already have a "Click here to
see full article" button. This is where the paywall should be.

You start to read the article, it seems interesting ? You click (and then have
to login, pay , or whatever).

Of course it might result of some sort of redacting bait, but why not try that
?

There'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.

You can pay from 0.99€ for a 48h test, so you can see if the content is worthy
for you.

(not affiliated at all, I just think they do this the good way)

[0] [https://www.nextinpact.com/](https://www.nextinpact.com/)

------
etiam
> 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.

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't already taken for meaning building
on public technologies).

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.

------
pessimizer
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.

The only reason I bypass paywalls is so I don'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't even bother.

edit: there are outlets I donate to, and they don't even have paywalls. This
may sound weird, but I donate to orgs so they produce content that _other
people_ can read. People who want me to read their takes should really be
paying me.

------
envolt
Should I expect Netflix to work on Incognito?

------
sprafa
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.

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.

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?

~~~
knd775
They've been using soft paywalls which allow people to read a certain number
of articles per month for free. To prevent users from simply using incognito
mode to pretend every visit is their first visit, publishers started detecting
incognito mode and blocking them from reading articles using it (without
signing in).

~~~
tjoff
Which was quite frustrating for us that only ever surf in incognito.

Now we'll see what their response is, probably something moronic as 5 views
per IP.

Better to just require an account straight up. Then there is no point for
anyone to link to them and we will get rid of the whole "will I be able to
read this link mess".

------
theamk
"death of the metered paywall."?

I understand this is publisher-centric newspaper, but it's not like it was
that hard to bypass it.

If I remember right, Chrome had "open guest window" functionality forever,
which bypasses the detectors as wll -- and it only took 4 clicks (select all,
copy, open guest window, paste-and-go)

Sure 4 click -> 1 click reduction is a big change, but it is hardly "death of
metered firewall"

------
kyledrake
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?

Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible
and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of
journalism are thriving.

~~~
pier25
> _Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving._

Such as?

~~~
orwin
Most investigative journalism, at least in France, only live from
subscribtion. And it is starting to works pretty well.

~~~
shusson
examples?

~~~
ooOOoo
Mediapart with subscriber numbers exceeding 150,000 and net profits in 2018 at
almost 2 million euros

See [https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-
ye...](https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-years-
independence-mediapart-s-2018-results-facts-and-figures)

~~~
tandr
so... they are making 13 1/3 euro per subscriber per year. Is it a good amount
or not-so-good?

------
zxcvbn4038
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.

------
DoreenMichele
I hate paywalls. I rail a lot about my inability to adequately monetize my
writing, but I want to put that information out there "free to the public."

Ideals: They don't seem to keep me fed.

But I'm not going to ever paywall my writing anyway.

------
sourthyme
Do I want sites to know I'm in private mode? Probably not. So paywalls will
have to find a different way.

------
pilif
No. This isn'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.

Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content. Then
none of this applies.

~~~
AJ007
“Intrusion attempt” as alleged in the article is more like an “intrusion
attempt” by the publishers to exploit a bug in the user’s web browser.

Publishers have every ability to use some DRMed iOS app and bypass the web
completely. Instead they want their cake (free SE & sharing traffic) and eat
it too (paid or demographically tracked and ad targeted visitors.)

------
radium3d
They should think hard about their next move because all that these paywalls
have done is make it so I don't read their articles, and I don't feel like I'm
missing anything. Maybe I'm the only one? I'm definitely not signing up to
read them either.

~~~
hedora
I wish they’d just ban incognito-blocked articles from HN (or at least flag
them, so I don’t waste my time).

Modifying browsers is preferable to that. It will (hopefully) solve the the
problem at the source, and make a HN-level solution redundant.

I imagine other news aggregators face the same problem.

------
bronzeage
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

------
FabHK
> Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented
> access to the content

Using incognito mode in the browser to make it a bit harder to be tracked
(without even blocking ads!) is "an intrusion attempt"? Excuse me? That's
absurd language.

~~~
amelius
The author was deliberately trying to use incognito mode to view the paywalled
content, so this is imho rightfully called an intrusion attempt.

Of course, if you're just using incognito mode normally and happened to visit
the same page, then it is not an intrusion attempt but just incognito
browsing.

The whole point is that news websites can't distinguish between the two.

~~~
FabHK
I am deliberately using incognito by default (eg now), and if websites don't
want to give me their content without tracking me then they should properly
paywall their content and ask me to log in - then we both understand what's
going on.

Frankly, considering this an intrusion attempt reveals a crazy, completely
warped mindset: "We _will_ track you, we want to know exactly who you are and
what you read and how long, and if you attempt to evade this surveillance, you
are an intruder!"

I use unique emails when signing up for websites - is that intrusion, too?

~~~
basch
I would think incognito would make it easier to track, if your session
persists until you close incognito. Youd be much better off with umatrix
blocking cookies and javascript.

------
pcora
This entire system is just borked. And part of it, is why fake-news spread so
easily, since people can'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.

Hard paywalls will just make even less people to read sites like nyt, wp, wsj
and their revenue will probably go even down.

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's a few websites
that I don't even click anymore because of that.. and the list just keeps
growing to me.

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

~~~
shusson
> NYT already blocks you from reading articles when you’re in incognito

hmm this is exactly what the update will prevent...

~~~
alkibiades
ah i thought it was preventing people from a method of tracking you despite
having incognito on. my bad

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40acres
Is this not anti-competitve? I don't know Google'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 "sample" of the work. If this goes to trial I can see myself on
the side of publishers.

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zamadatix
I'm amazed that an article about a tracking loophole being closed is posted on
HN and the top comment is "is this not anti-competitive". This is not Google
subverting advertiser networks for their benefit this is Google fixing a flaw
in Incognito mode that has been lazily applied to prevent users from working
around article limits.

The browser is an agent of the user, don't expect it to reliably hold
information that determines what content they have rights to on your server.

