Nobody cares if you want to sell the secrets of the universe for $5000/mo. We care about the bait and switch.
By setting up this bait and switch, you hurt your own paywall - if the search engine can get a full copy, so can I. Want these extensions to stop working? Stop the bait and switch.
As for the read path, the sites consented to Google indexing their stuff, and Google consents to letting people read the crawler cache. I don't see the issue.
I would be a lot less annoyed with these paywalls if they didn't rank so highly on search results, or at the very least indicated they were paywalled on the search page and were easy to filter out.
The technology does not allow them to do this without sharing it with you as well. But that is ethically irrelevant.
(Of course, we also deserve a good search engine allowing us to remove paywalled sites and seo spam from our results.)
We widely regard the above as unethical.
Adding content to a search engine literally says "you can come read this content!". That is the purpose of search engines. Even Google penalizes paywall behavior and will downrank them - which forces the paywall people to get more clever.
Sorry but don't abuse search engines and users to sell your content. Buy ads like a big boy.
Though I do agree, the bait and switch aspect of finessing seo and such leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Glad google penalizes such behavior
If they don't like it they can not submit to search engines.
According to the law, someone did.
Just because something's available on request from a server does not mean it's up for grabs.
When you give the content out for free to the indexer, you have given a copy to the world. Google search is not your advertising machine - you can pay for that priviledge if you would care for it.
It's actually everyone's business because this creates a web that is less usable for everyone. If publishers were willing to commit and make their paid content server-side for customers only, they would have a stronger case against infringers.
They provide users with an expectation of what information they will receive if they pay for the content.
The fact that this "glimpse" of the content pollutes your web searches is a search engine problem.
It would be trivial to filter sites with paywalled content. But Google refuses to let you do that. Hope someone else will come along and help with that.
I don’t get this. They do whatever they want with their content. Editors give free book copies to journalists; that doesn’t gives you the right to have one as well.
The difference is consent.
Google is obeying robots.txt. Google caches a copy of what you serve and gives that out. That is part of the deal.
Nobody does that. The comparison doesn’t hold.
The idea that a single public exhibition of a work is enough to invalidate any future sale of that work is totally silly. Are you gonna bust out the window of a Barnes & Noble because libraries exist?
It’s exactly the same. You give access to an entity that serves to promote your content. The fact that Google’s cache is accessible is a technical implementation detail; Google could remove access to that cache tomorrow and that wouldn’t change anything.
It's intentional to fix the kind of abusive behavior you are engaging in. If you serve content to a search engine, that search engine will reproduce the content.
Search engines are for publically available content.
If you want to advertise, pay for it.