There are some obvious cases in which this is unacceptable, but they are few and far between. The overwhelming majority of captive portals I see are just trying to get your contact info... so now you have two reasons why they should disappear.
Everyone goes to the mall, not to shop, it would seem, but to use the free wifi and bask in the comfort of free aircon.
Captive portals are here to stay in places around the world, and like it or not, they are a widely used solution that is not going away any time soon. I for one applaud the author of this website's attempts to shine light on the problem of authenticating to this network type.
IIRC in some countries they're required (by law) to do so, because, y'know, terrorists.
Normally you would think it would just be easier to set a wifi password and skip the captive portal nonsense, but so many vendors harbor the fantasy that other people will pay for the wifi so they have to leave it open and put a "buy 24 hours of internet for only $30!" link in there.
I hate captive portals. They are such a nuisance, especially when you have your machine configured to always connect via VPN.
> but $2 would be a more appropriate price tag for a few hours of Internet
Correct. That's (one of the reasons) why Starbucks coffee is pricier.