Re Getting around paywalls ...

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Christian Huitema <huitema () huitema net>
Date: Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 9:41 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Getting around paywalls ...
To: <dave () farber net>, ip <ip () listbox com>




On 4/25/2017 6:45 AM, Dave Farber wrote:




Begin forwarded message:

*From:* Dan Tappan <dan.tappan () gmail com>
*Date:* April 25, 2017 at 8:06:11 AM EDT
*To:* dave () farber net, ip <ip () listbox com>


*Subject:* *Re: [IP] Re Getting around paywalls ...*

I've been calling for a micro-payments system for reading newspaper
articles for a long time. I'm all for supporting journalism, and I have
digital subscriptions to a number of publications, but asking people to pay
on the order of $200 a year to 1/2 dozen different publications is just not
reasonable. Absolute $$$ aside, by the time you get to that many
subscriptions you're just reading the occasional article from each so the
$$/article is way out of whack.

There is also a privacy issue there. Many newspapers are ad funded. The ads
are a distraction and a nuisance, but they would be tolerable if it were
not for the underlying tracking. The advertisement technology has given us
ad auctions and a complex opaque ecosystem that basically attempts to keep
tabs on people and their browsing history. Many of us believe that this
"corporate surveillance" system is just evil. The best protection against
that surveillance is to use ad blockers, or more specifically tracking
blockers.

Of course, blocking ads also blocks the revenues of the ad-funded
newspapers. They are not happy about it, and I often get the suggestion to
buy a subscription. The problem there is that buying a subscription does
not prevent the tracking. The typical "privacy" policy is hard to find --
for the New York Times, for example, you have to scroll to the very bottom
of the home page, the very last line of gray tiny print, and find the
"privacy" keyword. (It is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/privacy/policy/privacy-policy.html.)
If you click on it, you get a long page that was probably vetted by a team
of lawyers and describes every kind of tracking and advertising that they
could think off.

Nowhere will you get something as simple as "if you subscribe and you opt
to not be tracked, we will not track you and we will also not let third
parties track you through our site." And that's too bad, because if they
did say that I would in fact subscribe to many of these newspapers. But
what you get is instead, "if you subscribe, we will verify your identity in
order to check the subscription, and we will track you even more
efficiently than if you were not a subscriber." No, thanks.

So, yes, if anonymous micro-payments worked, that would be great.


-- Christian Huitema
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