8 ms·

Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

157 points by Isofarro 7y ago

Willson50 7y ago
https://outline.com/Vvztk6 https://outline.com/Vvztk6
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- JeanMarcS 7y ago
  Thanks for that
sourthyme 7y ago
Do I want sites to know I'm in private mode? Probably not. So paywalls will have to find a different way.
sprafa 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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".
- minedwiz 7y ago
  No, I'm with you. It's an odd piece. Purely anecdotally, I never remember seeing the "Incognito walls" before a year or so ago; paywalls are clearly able to function even if they can't stop the use of private modes. Many/most paywalls can be bypassed by blocking or wiping cookies. I wonder if news sites are going to come for cookie blocking next.
- hedora 7y ago
  I think the author is upset because publishers want to have their cake and eat it too: It has long been google’s (and all other successful search engines’) policy that sites should present the same content to the web crawler and to human beings. Soft paywalls are essentially a loophole in that (at least superficially) pro-consumer rule, and incognito blockers are apparently taking that loophole one step too far. This move will fix the issue by changing the browser instead of page ranks. Here is an unfounded conspiracy theory: People noticed that regularly clearing cookies works better than incognito mode, so they were switching to that because of incognito blockers, and that presents an existential threat to Google’s cash cow. I don’t believe the previous paragraph, but I really want an extension that nukes all browser state if my computer / device is idle for more than 4 hours. The only exceptions would be bookmarks and password management.
duxup 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    > while their subscription terms continue to be asinine Agreed. The only official way to cancel a NYT subscription is to call them. Infuriating.
    - duxup 7y ago
      At least as far as NYT Digital goes ... I can cancel my subscription online with the click of a button.
      - john_minsk 7y ago
        And I had to call to Croatia to cancel mine. There are definitely dark patterns these guys using. Which was very surprising to see from true-journalism-northern-star
        duxup 7y ago
        Strange. I did JUST check mine and the option is there for me. Possibly they changed something between your adventure and mine.
    - 7y ago
pilif 7y ago
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.
- shusson 7y ago
  > Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content This is part of the articles point. Forcing people to login is going to hurt conversion.
- AJ007 7y ago
  “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.)
skrowl 7y ago
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.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Cookie Autodelete on FireFox is really great; it automatically clears cookies and local storage as soon as you navigate away.
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    Also see the Temporary Containers extension.
qmarchi 7y ago
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.
- hedora 7y ago
  At this point, publishers should probably just accept that any tracking is unacceptable, so if they want people to pay (and therefore login), then they need to stop funneling data to ad networks and other PII aggregators.
  - dymk 7y ago
    Who says it’s unacceptable? The incredibly tiny minority of readers coming from HN?
    - brandmeyer 7y ago
      I used to think this was a tiny minority, too. But a key takeway from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n... was this statistic: "26% of Internet users are now blocking ads." Its a minority, but its not tiny.
      - dymk 7y ago
        Very, very probably only to declutter their screen. Does the survey collect intent about why they install it? I doubt anywhere near 26% block ads because of tracking. I doubt even 1% if users even understand what tracking means.
        tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
        Many of them probably also didn't set the ad blocker up themselves - they have tech-savvy relatives handle their computer stuff, and those tech-savvy relatives have realized that fewer ads means fewer malicious social engineering ads means less malware to remove during the next visit.
alkibiades 7y ago
NYT already blocks you from reading articles when you’re in incognito.
- shusson 7y ago
  > NYT already blocks you from reading articles when you’re in incognito hmm this is exactly what the update will prevent...
  - alkibiades 7y ago
    ah i thought it was preventing people from a method of tracking you despite having incognito on. my bad
pcora 7y ago
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.
moioci 7y ago
Newbie question: Would it work for publishers to key off of IP address instead of using cookies?
- hedora 7y ago
  Yes, but with a significant false positive rate due to IP address sharing, and you can get more articles by switching IP’s (unless someone else exhausted the new IP before you got it).
- eof 7y ago
  Not really. Problems arise when you have many people behind the same IP. You can hand-wave this problem away for family units behind a router, but you'll soon find out there are entire institutions (schools, office buildings with lots of unrelated companies in them, etc) that will share an IP.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- paxswill 7y ago
  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_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not...
- ronsor 7y ago
  it works for IPv6 (where one IPv6 address really does equal one person)
bob_theslob646 7y ago
Why is this a bad thing? The tone of the author makes it seem like this is catastrophic. Is it?
- gtirloni 7y ago
  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 7y ago
  Looks like a publisher association news or something like that. So they look at this information from the publisher side.
unclesams-uncle 7y ago
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.
radium3d 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- asark 7y ago
  Keeping up with day-to-day or even week-to-week news is very, very nearly worthless to almost everyone. It's just entertainment, barely—if at all—more laudable or improving than watching soap operas or reading airport novels.
FabHK 7y ago
> 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.
- edoceo 7y ago
  Right, because you're "intruding" where you're not supposed to. It's hyperbolic but not wholly inaccurate. Gotta get clicks!
  - jhall1468 7y ago
    I would argue they are intruding in that they are accessing information from my browser that they shouldn't have access to. If their website allows me to read an article they don't want me to by going to "www.nytimes.com" that's not an intrusion, that's poor gating on their part.
    - testvox 7y ago
      Couldn't you say the same thing about any security hole? If Equifax didn't want people reading their databases then they shouldn't have allowed anyone with an internet connection to remotely execute code on their systems via https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/issues/8064 https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/issues/8064
      - jhall1468 7y ago
        There's an enormous difference between accessing a public endpoint, and accessing one that isn't intended to be public. To use addresses as an analogy: Going to www.nytimes.com is roughly the equivalent to driving in front of someones house. It's certainly not my fault if they leave their blinds open while they are naked. Now maybe they thought I was someone else due to the car I drove, but that sure as shit isn't my problem. Equifax is an entirely different issue. If you leave the door open to your house, that sure as hell doesn't give me the right to go into it. I can look at it, I can even tell everyone "Hey, that door is wide open." But I can't go in do shit without permission to be there.
kyledrake 7y ago
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.
- rkachowski 7y ago
  to be fair, they're not mutually exclusive. It would be interesting to discover the stagnating effects of closing your doors to all but those willing to pay. Perhaps naively, I assume the majority of paying customers were dedicated readers before the paywalls went up. How are new users brought into the funnel of such an exclusive system?
- pier25 7y ago
  > Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving. Such as?
  - orwin 7y ago
    Most investigative journalism, at least in France, only live from subscribtion. And it is starting to works pretty well.
    - shusson 7y ago
      examples?
      - ooOOoo 7y ago
        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-years-independence-mediapart-s-2018-results-facts-and-figures https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-ye...
vman81 7y ago
> 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?
kerblang 7y ago
Since the article doesn't bother explaining the loophole being patched: https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incognito/ https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incog...
- z2 7y ago
  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-way-detect-chrome-incognito-mode/ https://9to5google.com/2019/07/23/researcher-discovers-new-w...
aorth 7y ago
The title is confusing click bait and the article content is garbage... "intrusion attempt"? "master key"?
- ungzd 7y ago
  What is even more ironic is that it has anti-adblocker.
  - DangitBobby 7y ago
    Which can be circumvented by sophisticated hacking techniques such as pressing escape before the page finishes loading all the bullshit
- austhrow743 7y ago
  The whole thing uses weird language to try to paint the practice of serving one thing to google and another to people coming from google as some kind of feature.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  Yeah that part was crazy. Full quote: > Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt
donohoe 7y ago
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).
Tepix 7y ago
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.
rhinoceraptor 7y ago
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.
- WalterSear 7y ago
  User tracking and search engine pollution via paywalled results.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Like Google?
  - draw_down 7y ago
    Zing!
crazygringo 7y ago
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?
- bananaoomarang 7y ago
  Not 100% sure but I think it is something to do with being able to write to localstorage (e.g. if the site figures it can't write there then it is in Incognito). I read it was something like that.
- woogley 7y ago
  TFA links to this in the first sentence: https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/protecting-private-browsing-chrome/ https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-ini... Basically, attempting to use FileSystem API but getting an Error === Incognito
zxcvbn4038 7y ago
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.
mschuster91 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- pkaye 7y ago
  I think none of this will work in the long run. There is too much content available for free. I have a digital magazine subscription (access to 1000s of magazines) but I hardly ever use it because there is so much alternative content. I might cancel in the future.
theamk 7y ago
"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"
JeanMarcS 7y ago
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/
matthewmcg 7y ago
Opening with a Niall Ferguson quote doesn’t help the author’s credibility for people familiar with the history of that particular “historian.”
- panzagl 7y ago
  Niall Ferguson is a historian, what makes you think otherwise?
  - literallycancer 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Opinions_and_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Opinions_and_re...
    - panzagl 7y ago
      Believe it or not, historians are supposed to have opinions.
jancsika 7y ago
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?
jwmoz 7y ago
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.
- OrgNet 7y ago
  You are thinking of the old Google.
- creato 7y ago
  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.
guhcampos 7y ago
Don't build your business model over a bug - I guess.
echelon 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    > 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?
pessimizer 7y ago
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.
etiam 7y ago
> 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.
kabdib 7y ago
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 7y ago
  This is Apple's News+ in the nutshell, so federated subscription service you're envisioning would have to compete with Apple.
  - zhoujianfu 7y ago
    Looks like apple news just needs to have a few different bundles, like one that includes The NY Times, Bloomberg, and the economist..
  - andromeduck 7y ago
    My problem with apple news is that it still doesn't really resolve the gamified nature of news and the misaligned incentives between a concise but high quality and information dense content that the user wants and the click-bait, flame bait, low density, attention stealing articles news companies are incentive to write when their compensation is proportional to impressions and time engagement irrespective of the quality of that interaction. I want to be able to have a non trivial level of discretion as to which writers/groups to starve and which to support. For example, being able to pick a handful of sites or articles where my subscription/views/view-time don't count towards their bottom line. Or we could set aside 30-40% of subscription cost to distribute based on the the proportion of some active user action for like Medium's claps or some other rating. At present the economist/ft are the only publications that haven't let me down in a big way and I'm weary of supporting anything else.
eappleby 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
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.
turc1656 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
liability 7y ago
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.
- afastow 7y ago
  I don't think anyone argues that journalism is in a healthy place today, but what is the alternative? The problem is that real news costs real money to produce. Newspapers could be not-for-profit but their reporters would still need a salary to do their jobs.
  - _delirium 7y ago
    Some good publications are nonpaywalled nonprofits that rely on donations. Not sure you can make that work in every niche, but two examples: https://www.quantamagazine.org/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/, https://www.texastribune.org/ https://www.texastribune.org/
    - danharaj 7y ago
      Quanta has the Simons foundation behind it. How free is a press if it can only live off the good will of a billionaire?
      - levythe 7y ago
        While your question isn't wrong, how is that fundamentally different from how things were before? How can news be free if it relies upon paying readership for its sustained production?
        danharaj 7y ago
        There was a brief golden age of newspapers that went away with industrialization. It hasn't been Ben Franklin's game for a long time and I think people need to think about what that has meant and will mean.
lucasmullens 7y ago
You could always just use a different browser, clear your cookies, or even just use another Google Chrome profile.
dingo_bat 7y ago
It was kind of stupid that incognito mode was detectable by websites. Glad Google is finally fixing the bug. There is no reason to broadcast my browser's internal settings to the world.
40acres 7y ago
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.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  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.
- LegitShady 7y ago
  no. the users are allowed to use incognito mode. that there was a flaw in it that made it less effective is not google promoting competition, and fixing said security flaw is not about competition again. Is windows fixing security flaws anti competition? Sounds like anti virus companies should sue.
- magduf 7y ago
  Your analogy just doesn't work in the digital world, just like so many other analogies with physical things. The publishers are happily sending their entire articles to people whether they pay or not. Then they add in some Javascript code to cover up the article if they don't pay up. Google has done nothing more than prevent this code from running, which is what the users want. The users own the computers, and they have every right to choose what code to run on it. Nothing is forcing the publishers to send the entire article to non-paying users. They only do it because it's convenient for them. If they don't like Google's actions, they're free to come up with a different technical method of hiding their articles from non-paying users. Most other subscription-based sites don't do these things: they force you to login to access premium content, so the only way to get that data is to either have a valid login, or to hack the site somehow (which is obviously illegal).
riffic 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    That's a much better way to phrase this idea, thank you.
ameixaseca 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
envolt 7y ago
Should I expect Netflix to work on Incognito?
EGreg 7y ago
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!
stubish 7y ago
Love the Washington Post screen shot. "Private Browsing is permitted exclusively for our subscribers", which is a logical contradiction.
bronzeage 7y ago
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

157 points by Isofarro 7y ago

Willson50 7y ago

https://outline.com/Vvztk6 https://outline.com/Vvztk6

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JeanMarcS 7y ago
Thanks for that

sourthyme 7y ago

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

sprafa 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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".
minedwiz 7y ago
No, I'm with you. It's an odd piece. Purely anecdotally, I never remember seeing the "Incognito walls" before a year or so ago; paywalls are clearly able to function even if they can't stop the use of private modes. Many/most paywalls can be bypassed by blocking or wiping cookies. I wonder if news sites are going to come for cookie blocking next.
hedora 7y ago
I think the author is upset because publishers want to have their cake and eat it too: It has long been google’s (and all other successful search engines’) policy that sites should present the same content to the web crawler and to human beings. Soft paywalls are essentially a loophole in that (at least superficially) pro-consumer rule, and incognito blockers are apparently taking that loophole one step too far. This move will fix the issue by changing the browser instead of page ranks. Here is an unfounded conspiracy theory: People noticed that regularly clearing cookies works better than incognito mode, so they were switching to that because of incognito blockers, and that presents an existential threat to Google’s cash cow. I don’t believe the previous paragraph, but I really want an extension that nukes all browser state if my computer / device is idle for more than 4 hours. The only exceptions would be bookmarks and password management.

duxup 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > while their subscription terms continue to be asinine Agreed. The only official way to cancel a NYT subscription is to call them. Infuriating.
  - duxup 7y ago
    At least as far as NYT Digital goes ... I can cancel my subscription online with the click of a button.
    - john_minsk 7y ago
      And I had to call to Croatia to cancel mine. There are definitely dark patterns these guys using. Which was very surprising to see from true-journalism-northern-star
      - duxup 7y ago
        Strange. I did JUST check mine and the option is there for me. Possibly they changed something between your adventure and mine.
  - 7y ago

pilif 7y ago

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.

shusson 7y ago
> Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content This is part of the articles point. Forcing people to login is going to hurt conversion.
AJ007 7y ago
“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.)

skrowl 7y ago

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.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

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 7y ago
Cookie Autodelete on FireFox is really great; it automatically clears cookies and local storage as soon as you navigate away.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Also see the Temporary Containers extension.

qmarchi 7y ago

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.

hedora 7y ago
At this point, publishers should probably just accept that any tracking is unacceptable, so if they want people to pay (and therefore login), then they need to stop funneling data to ad networks and other PII aggregators.
- dymk 7y ago
  Who says it’s unacceptable? The incredibly tiny minority of readers coming from HN?
  - brandmeyer 7y ago
    I used to think this was a tiny minority, too. But a key takeway from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n... was this statistic: "26% of Internet users are now blocking ads." Its a minority, but its not tiny.
    - dymk 7y ago
      Very, very probably only to declutter their screen. Does the survey collect intent about why they install it? I doubt anywhere near 26% block ads because of tracking. I doubt even 1% if users even understand what tracking means.
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
        Many of them probably also didn't set the ad blocker up themselves - they have tech-savvy relatives handle their computer stuff, and those tech-savvy relatives have realized that fewer ads means fewer malicious social engineering ads means less malware to remove during the next visit.

alkibiades 7y ago

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

shusson 7y ago
> NYT already blocks you from reading articles when you’re in incognito hmm this is exactly what the update will prevent...
- alkibiades 7y ago
  ah i thought it was preventing people from a method of tracking you despite having incognito on. my bad

pcora 7y ago

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.

moioci 7y ago

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

hedora 7y ago
Yes, but with a significant false positive rate due to IP address sharing, and you can get more articles by switching IP’s (unless someone else exhausted the new IP before you got it).
eof 7y ago
Not really. Problems arise when you have many people behind the same IP. You can hand-wave this problem away for family units behind a router, but you'll soon find out there are entire institutions (schools, office buildings with lots of unrelated companies in them, etc) that will share an IP.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
paxswill 7y ago
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_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not...
ronsor 7y ago
it works for IPv6 (where one IPv6 address really does equal one person)

bob_theslob646 7y ago

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

gtirloni 7y ago
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 7y ago
Looks like a publisher association news or something like that. So they look at this information from the publisher side.

unclesams-uncle 7y ago

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.

radium3d 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
asark 7y ago
Keeping up with day-to-day or even week-to-week news is very, very nearly worthless to almost everyone. It's just entertainment, barely—if at all—more laudable or improving than watching soap operas or reading airport novels.

FabHK 7y ago

> 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.

edoceo 7y ago
Right, because you're "intruding" where you're not supposed to. It's hyperbolic but not wholly inaccurate. Gotta get clicks!
- jhall1468 7y ago
  I would argue they are intruding in that they are accessing information from my browser that they shouldn't have access to. If their website allows me to read an article they don't want me to by going to "www.nytimes.com" that's not an intrusion, that's poor gating on their part.
  - testvox 7y ago
    Couldn't you say the same thing about any security hole? If Equifax didn't want people reading their databases then they shouldn't have allowed anyone with an internet connection to remotely execute code on their systems via https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/issues/8064 https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/issues/8064
    - jhall1468 7y ago
      There's an enormous difference between accessing a public endpoint, and accessing one that isn't intended to be public. To use addresses as an analogy: Going to www.nytimes.com is roughly the equivalent to driving in front of someones house. It's certainly not my fault if they leave their blinds open while they are naked. Now maybe they thought I was someone else due to the car I drove, but that sure as shit isn't my problem. Equifax is an entirely different issue. If you leave the door open to your house, that sure as hell doesn't give me the right to go into it. I can look at it, I can even tell everyone "Hey, that door is wide open." But I can't go in do shit without permission to be there.

kyledrake 7y ago

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.

rkachowski 7y ago
to be fair, they're not mutually exclusive. It would be interesting to discover the stagnating effects of closing your doors to all but those willing to pay. Perhaps naively, I assume the majority of paying customers were dedicated readers before the paywalls went up. How are new users brought into the funnel of such an exclusive system?
pier25 7y ago
> Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving. Such as?
- orwin 7y ago
  Most investigative journalism, at least in France, only live from subscribtion. And it is starting to works pretty well.
  - shusson 7y ago
    examples?
    - ooOOoo 7y ago
      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-years-independence-mediapart-s-2018-results-facts-and-figures https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-ye...

vman81 7y ago

> 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?

kerblang 7y ago

Since the article doesn't bother explaining the loophole being patched: https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incognito/ https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incog...

z2 7y ago
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-way-detect-chrome-incognito-mode/ https://9to5google.com/2019/07/23/researcher-discovers-new-w...

aorth 7y ago

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

ungzd 7y ago
What is even more ironic is that it has anti-adblocker.
- DangitBobby 7y ago
  Which can be circumvented by sophisticated hacking techniques such as pressing escape before the page finishes loading all the bullshit
austhrow743 7y ago
The whole thing uses weird language to try to paint the practice of serving one thing to google and another to people coming from google as some kind of feature.
gnicholas 7y ago
Yeah that part was crazy. Full quote: > Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt

donohoe 7y ago

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).

Tepix 7y ago

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.

rhinoceraptor 7y ago

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.

WalterSear 7y ago
User tracking and search engine pollution via paywalled results.
52-6F-62 7y ago
Like Google?
- draw_down 7y ago
  Zing!

crazygringo 7y ago

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?

bananaoomarang 7y ago
Not 100% sure but I think it is something to do with being able to write to localstorage (e.g. if the site figures it can't write there then it is in Incognito). I read it was something like that.
woogley 7y ago
TFA links to this in the first sentence: https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/protecting-private-browsing-chrome/ https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-ini... Basically, attempting to use FileSystem API but getting an Error === Incognito

zxcvbn4038 7y ago

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.

mschuster91 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
pkaye 7y ago
I think none of this will work in the long run. There is too much content available for free. I have a digital magazine subscription (access to 1000s of magazines) but I hardly ever use it because there is so much alternative content. I might cancel in the future.

theamk 7y ago

"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"

JeanMarcS 7y ago

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/

matthewmcg 7y ago

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

panzagl 7y ago
Niall Ferguson is a historian, what makes you think otherwise?
- literallycancer 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Opinions_and_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Opinions_and_re...
  - panzagl 7y ago
    Believe it or not, historians are supposed to have opinions.

jancsika 7y ago

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?

jwmoz 7y ago

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.

OrgNet 7y ago
You are thinking of the old Google.
creato 7y ago
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.

guhcampos 7y ago

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

echelon 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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?

pessimizer 7y ago

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.

etiam 7y ago

> 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.

kabdib 7y ago

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 7y ago
This is Apple's News+ in the nutshell, so federated subscription service you're envisioning would have to compete with Apple.
- zhoujianfu 7y ago
  Looks like apple news just needs to have a few different bundles, like one that includes The NY Times, Bloomberg, and the economist..
- andromeduck 7y ago
  My problem with apple news is that it still doesn't really resolve the gamified nature of news and the misaligned incentives between a concise but high quality and information dense content that the user wants and the click-bait, flame bait, low density, attention stealing articles news companies are incentive to write when their compensation is proportional to impressions and time engagement irrespective of the quality of that interaction. I want to be able to have a non trivial level of discretion as to which writers/groups to starve and which to support. For example, being able to pick a handful of sites or articles where my subscription/views/view-time don't count towards their bottom line. Or we could set aside 30-40% of subscription cost to distribute based on the the proportion of some active user action for like Medium's claps or some other rating. At present the economist/ft are the only publications that haven't let me down in a big way and I'm weary of supporting anything else.

eappleby 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

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.

turc1656 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

liability 7y ago

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.

afastow 7y ago
I don't think anyone argues that journalism is in a healthy place today, but what is the alternative? The problem is that real news costs real money to produce. Newspapers could be not-for-profit but their reporters would still need a salary to do their jobs.
- _delirium 7y ago
  Some good publications are nonpaywalled nonprofits that rely on donations. Not sure you can make that work in every niche, but two examples: https://www.quantamagazine.org/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/, https://www.texastribune.org/ https://www.texastribune.org/
  - danharaj 7y ago
    Quanta has the Simons foundation behind it. How free is a press if it can only live off the good will of a billionaire?
    - levythe 7y ago
      While your question isn't wrong, how is that fundamentally different from how things were before? How can news be free if it relies upon paying readership for its sustained production?
      - danharaj 7y ago
        There was a brief golden age of newspapers that went away with industrialization. It hasn't been Ben Franklin's game for a long time and I think people need to think about what that has meant and will mean.

lucasmullens 7y ago

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

dingo_bat 7y ago

It was kind of stupid that incognito mode was detectable by websites. Glad Google is finally fixing the bug. There is no reason to broadcast my browser's internal settings to the world.

40acres 7y ago

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.

zamadatix 7y ago
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.
LegitShady 7y ago
no. the users are allowed to use incognito mode. that there was a flaw in it that made it less effective is not google promoting competition, and fixing said security flaw is not about competition again. Is windows fixing security flaws anti competition? Sounds like anti virus companies should sue.
magduf 7y ago
Your analogy just doesn't work in the digital world, just like so many other analogies with physical things. The publishers are happily sending their entire articles to people whether they pay or not. Then they add in some Javascript code to cover up the article if they don't pay up. Google has done nothing more than prevent this code from running, which is what the users want. The users own the computers, and they have every right to choose what code to run on it. Nothing is forcing the publishers to send the entire article to non-paying users. They only do it because it's convenient for them. If they don't like Google's actions, they're free to come up with a different technical method of hiding their articles from non-paying users. Most other subscription-based sites don't do these things: they force you to login to access premium content, so the only way to get that data is to either have a valid login, or to hack the site somehow (which is obviously illegal).

riffic 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  That's a much better way to phrase this idea, thank you.

ameixaseca 7y ago

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 7y ago
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?

envolt 7y ago

Should I expect Netflix to work on Incognito?

EGreg 7y ago

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!

stubish 7y ago

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

bronzeage 7y ago

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