I know off topic but from 12 foot’s homepage:

> You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter.

Why ought you? That sounds not only incredibly entitled, but also extremely one sided. The world isn’t being created for your convenience and wallet. It would be better if the bias was explicit, like “I would prefer to be able to get all information free of charge,” in which case honesty and audacity are clear.

This reminds me of the old hacker cry “information wants to be free,” which of course anthropomorphizes information and hides the bias, which is the hacker wants all information independent of everyone else’s concern.

If you want to put content behind a wall of some kind, that is fine. You can't expect to have it be indexed in search. Having it show in search results while having a wall in front of it once someone clicks is a bait and switch. You can't have you cake and eat it too.

> You can't expect to have it be indexed in search

Why not? This is just as entitled a thought as the original quote from GP. Search engines aren't a public service. Neither is The Financial Times.

There's nothing that explicitly requires every single page that a search engine displays to be accessible by the user. There isn't even an internal policy within Google and other engines that would uphold that expectation. It might be a shitty user experience, but that's on the search engine and the resulting site to deal with.

Clearly, the FT has enough subscribers to be able to "lose" customers behind the paywall. And clearly Google isn't interested in cleaning up results to not include paywalls. So it seems they've both weighed the pros and cons and chose to continue with it. Who are we to tell them otherwsie?

I suppose we can drop the short adage and shout the much longer:

"If your site pops a newsletter modal, I will leave. If your search engine rewards this behavior, I will not use it. Good luck pal."

That's totally fine to do. That's a very honest position, which is different from what both 12ft conjectures as well as implements.

The "ought" can be taken quite literally with an appeal to Kantian ethics and the categorical imperative. Can you universalize the sentiment that your special snowflake information site deserves users registering and signing up for a newsletter? There are at least millions of such sites out there and each user will encounter tens if not hundreds of thousands over a lifetime of browsing and searching the web. No user can possibly maintain hundreds of thousands of unique registrations and subscriptions or read that many newsletters.

The only universalizable alternatives are platformization of everything, so people maintain registrations at Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook and those are now the only information sources accessible to anyone, or sites that contain information allow at least some of it to be accessed without requiring a registration or subscription that is unique to their site. Potentially some sort of universal SSO could solve the problem, but it would require universal buy-in from individual sites and would make privacy virtually impossible.

Note that offering such a thing, if a user decides your information content is really worth it after getting some sample and coming to trust and know you, is different from requiring it up front to see anything at all.

If you're appealing to some higher-level philosophical ideals, then that should be both identified and supported by argument. There's no real argument here, especially one that acknowledges the autonomy of the individual gatekeepers who possess the information you want, or acknowledgement that it costs them money to create such information that you wish to consume. It's a bit like saying 'education ought to be free, food ought to be free, health care ought to be free, and housing ought to be free.' Ok sure, that sounds lovely, but how? And if you method of how is simply stealing and cheating, well, then that's not so lovely, is it?

I doubt the scale that you suggest (especially the newsletter argument, which is typically free to sign up, rather than the monthly subscription that this site is really getting around), and if that was the case, then perhaps the solution is to find a better funding and browsing model that appeals to all rather than saying the solution is to circumvent against the information providers wishes. There have been various attempts so far from Apple News, Flipboard, Brave's browser, and briefly Google's micro-transactions for news, and we probably need more innovation in this space versus less.

Would you have made such an argument previously at the magazine stand? That no one could possibly buy all the magazines to get all the information? Just because Google's index and search is free doesn't mean the rest of the world ought to be.

I think everything should be free, and nobody should have to produce it.

Because then the only way to use the web would be to subscribe to everything. It's economically unfeasible.

I disagree in regards to it being listed in search results. I believe pay-walled content should get a hit compared to sources that are unrestricted or at least it should be tagged as such. Not condemning the practice itself, writers need an income too.

But if the google bot gets access to the content, I don't see why users should expect to be blocked.