Paywalls

Yesterday I read what some might think is good news. Tabloids in England are firing human writers because Google AI summaries are undercutting human reader traffic to their sites. To this I have two comments.

Before every newspaper was pay-walled I would browse to The Guardian, the Independent, Le Monde, Le temps, Le Matin, and dozens of other newspapers. With time every one of them brought up a paywall and you might think “They’re right to, they deserve to be paid for the work they do but it’s worth remembering that for over a century, and during our lifetimes you could go to a newspaper stand or magazine shop and buy a newspaper and read all of the day’s stories, or you could buy a magazine and read all of the week’s or months articles. Now you’re expected to pay either for a single article, or per month, or per year.

In the mid to lake 90s and the early two thousands we could browse from news site to news site. I would visit the Guardian, the Independent, Le Temps, Tribune de Genève, New York Times and more. I would also look at the RTS, BBC News and other sites to check a number of sites for news. With time that freedom was lost.

We lost that freedom because websites became paywalled. We lost that freedom because some sites made it so that we would browse, but see nothing, in effect being clickbaited into clicking to a link that said “To view this content you need to pay”.