@babelcarp Pragmatically, there are numerous present work-arounds:

• Major US city daily papers are frequently available in public libraries, at least within the US. They're also available to students in public, private, and community colleges (the latter with low basic enrollment costs) through their own library systems. This is the least convenient, though most robust of several options.

• Archive.Today manages to puncture numerous paywalls. That's accessible if you use DuckDuckGo as your primary search engine with the !ais keyword. So simply prepend !ais <your URL here> to your navbar and access most content. https://archive.today/

• 12ft.io offers a similar capability, relying generally on web caches. https://12ft.io/

• The Internet Archive may have either online or print materials: https://archive.org/

Note of course that utilising any of these services does create yet another data-gathering gateway. Internet Archive at least has robust privacy policies and practices, I'm not sure of the others. Archive.Today does pass along the IP of a request to archive (though not AFAIU to read an existing snapshot) to the origin.

From a policy perspective what I've been advocating is for media access to be bundled into extant Internet service offerings. The ENTIRE advertising market worldwide is about $800 billion, which works out to ... about $100 per head worldwide. If we instead assume that the world's wealthiest 1 billion (roughly: the US, EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, and AU, Jr., a/k/a ennzed) foot the bill for the rest, it's still $800/person. Mind that that feeds both publishers and advertising firms. The total print publication market is a subset of this, and at roughly $100/person annually ($8/mo) it would be possible to provide an unmetered, all-you-can-eat, universal content access. Publishers and authors could be compensated much in the same way that present on-the-air music royalties operate, perhaps with a scaled rate based on the type and quality of material.

This, to use your favourite word, could replace all the overhead of individual subscriptions, public-media fundraisers, micropayments, adtech, and a vast amount of surveillance.

I've been suggesting variants of this for years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/

@kensanata

#UniversalContentSyndication #Media #Advertising #AdTech #Privacy #Micropayments #MicropaymentsDieDieDie #Journalism #DeathOfNewspapers