In a way these publishers are abusing a public service (search engines) to get a higher ranking, giving the illusion of publicly available content, but then breaking the promise. In practice for their personal private gain they are damaging the system for everyone else, which is much worse imho.

This is a false analogy for several reasons: 1. If, in your example, "but she was wearing a low cut top" was used as a justification by someone to physically sexually assault someone, then obviously that is wrong as we've established that rights to one's body belong to the person with said body and you need their consent. If on the other hand, you are simply looking at someone who is dressed provocatively, then while crass, that definitely is not and should not be illegal. In a public space, we each have a right to look wherever we please. We can be judged for where we look (and people should be judged for oogling at someone), but it shouldn't be illegal. There is no right to privacy in a public space for very good reasons. 2. But even if you meant it with the later case (the oogling), there is a huge difference in this case from a moral perspective, namely these are companies who are selling/monetizing their content. Thus, (a) they want you to look at their content and (b) they are ok with you paying to do so. So then your example would be much more akin to an art gallery putting their art on the public sidewalk to entice people to come in and see the art -- only to find that the people are happy to look at the free art on the sidewalk and never pay the entrance fee. No theft happened in that case. The art gallery simply had a flawed economic model where they gave away their product and then were angry no one paid for it.

If you put something in the public sphere, it is public. Simple as that. You have no right to turn your intention of how I "ought" to consume your product into forcing me to do so if you have given me your product for free.

Use a paywall, Use proper authorization.

I solely use firefox for getting around paywalls. I have it automatically clear all cookies upon exit. That way any website that gives a few free articles per month will always be free for me.

From an economics perspective, they are trying to using old school pricing tricks (e.g. bundling, price discrimination, variable unit pricing to enable 2 article users == free, 10 articles == paid) as a tool for managing their customer funnel. But the golden rule of price discrimination is it only works if you can actually prevent your customers from engaging in arbitrage and can keep them in their bucket. A store can have a policy like "limit 1 per customer" but that doesn't prevent me from getting 100 of my friends from buying the thing. If I want to clear my cookies and look like some anonymous new customer each time, there is absolutely nothing illegal OR immoral about that. That's capitalism and they have designed a pricing model that can be gamed.