These are bad times for paywalls. The business model seen as a solution for newspapers struggling to adapt to the internet has taken another battering with the launch of Chrome 76, the latest version of the world’s most popular browser.
Google has made some interesting changes: the first, a default block on Flash content, with the goal of eliminating support by December 2020, coinciding with Adobe’s plans to withdraw it. This was foreseeable: most browsers have been blocking what for years was the web’s star application for the distribution of content, but problematic in terms of security.
Another, more striking change has been to eliminate web sites’ ability to detect the use of incognito mode, which allows us to access sites that limit the number of visits.
Paywalls were seen as a business model for web journalism, allowing users to read a certain amount of content per month. The idea was to get us to subscribe if we thought the content good enough. The usual way round this was to locate the cookies used by the page to track user activity and eliminate them, a not particularly difficult maneuver, but somewhat tedious. Other fixes were to use browser plugins or tools to extract text from the site.
Now, things are even simpler: just click with the right button and open content in an incognito window so that the…
