is this legal? or even ethical?

We need to find better ways to sustain great journalism while making it easy for people to pay and consume.

E.g Could we just have one consortium of media contents to subscribe and use it across the web for a month, than buying in each website.

There are several sides to this, ex:

Is it ethical to advertise something that users (or indexers) expect to be freely accessible, and then to pull a bait-and-switch when they arrive?

Is it ethical for ads networks to spy on people, fingerprint their machines, and create dossers about them?

I agree with you in that we need to support the journalists doing the reporting. That's expensive, the companies that do it are mostly in dire financial straits, and most journalists themselves make very little money.

That said, micropayments have been tried over and over again, and fail. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/micropayment...

A universal subscription is incredibly difficult to set up logistically, especially wondering how you split up payments, who qualifies to be included, etc. Is it by traffic? That would incentivize clickbait even more.

I've written about my plan/thoughts here: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...

Yeah, on my dev.to article about it... I did say that if there's a publication that you read on a regular basis, you should pay and subscribe. This tool is mostly for reading an article that a friend sent you to and to use one-off.

The problem is the math doesn’t work. Apple News is the closest thing to a real version of this, but no publication can survive on that alone.

Similar efforts never hit critical mass.

I have thoughts on what could work but that’s a longer topic for another day.

>is this legal? or even ethical?

If I ask a public httpd for the content of a URL and it sends it to me, it's my choice to render it how I want. The fact that I might choose to disregard various CSS and overlays and javascript delivered along with the text body content is up to me.

If somebody really wants to implement a fully effective paywall they're welcome to put their content behind a fully active content generated system that requires a unique username/password, same as signing in to an airline's mileage program/ticketing system, your personal paypal account or online banking, etc. Nobody is out there building paywall bypasses that work to render the content of somebody else's Citibank account.

You are essentially describing X. You can view news there for free with ads or you can buy a subscription.

>We need to find better ways to sustain great journalism while making it easy for people to pay and consume.

journalists have always been employed and funded by the rich and powerful so that they can 1) amplify good news about the rich owner 2) drown out bad news about the rich owner 3) push agendas 4) resist opposing agendas.

the concept that at one time journalists were some independent rag tag group of truth-seekers is blown away by any historical recollection of the practice.

so : no , I don't think that we need to find better ways for people to pay and consume ; I think that's entirely up to the profiteers behind the mechanism to figure out how to do.

It's never been easier in history to be a nobody and get a message out to the masses; this is one of the only times in history where a journalist can do their job without selling their souls to the devil (paraphrasing hunter thompson).

and this is ignoring recent internet history of ad-malware, person-tracking, and compulsory clickbait headlines that beg the stupidest low-IQ takes possible in order to get you to click into a paywall.

I feel very little sympathy towards industries that'll save themselves from drowning by stepping onto their customers' heads to avoid the ocean.

You can already pay the journalist's employer, but ultimately your dollars will likely be going to a hedge fund owner or a billionaire like Bezos that buys up media and pays the journalist a bare minimum to keep them generating clicks.

For everyone else that doesn't pay, they'll ask their AI owned by billionaires to summarize the reporting and be satisfied.

What you're suggesting is supporting independent journalism not owned by a hedge fund or billionaire, which will eventually be acquired by capitalist interests unless you somehow magically convince all your neighbors that it's worth monetarily supporting for a greater good.

The people willing to pay $20/mo for AI are not as likely to pay $20/mo to support independent information sources at the same time, especially if you have to first pay to understand what they provide. This is why publications make their reporting freely available to crawlers, like WallHop.

If you regularly use WallHop to access reporting important to you, it's expected you make the investment if you know it will benefit the reporter and not a hedge fund owner/billionaire instead.

Inadvertently, as more high-quality reporting becomes gated behind a paywall, the major AI providers have a financial incentive to pay high-quality information providers with compensation for their original work, which could benefit independent journalists if such a thing were to happen. News exclusives provided to Google, Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, or OpenAI would be interesting to see. Would competing AI agents cite their competitors as a news source? Some AI giants are starting their own bio labs, so why not newsrooms?

Is it ethical for a newspaper to interview facist, antidemocratic politicians and then put the interview behind a paywall?

There are surely ethical newspapers that use paywalls, but the majority in my country (Germany) are mostly about rage bait and/or facist dogwhistles