Responding to specific criticism from your comments:
> It does feel excessive or cynical or something to install an actual app to work around a paywall. The WSJ organization says, you must pay us $28.99 a month for full access to this content. That's the value they've placed on their content, that's the price they are charging, and that's what people should pay.
> The fact that they also make most if not all of the content available on a "complimentary" basis via Google suggests that they do value occasional visits from non-subscribers.
> However if millions of non-subscribers were to install a paywall avoidance app and access the full content on a daily basis, this would probably violate the spirit of "occasional".
WSJ certainly deserves to set whatever price on their work that they wish, and they also deserved to be compensated according to the value of that work.
However, if the workaround is no more in violation of the "spirit of occasional [visits]" than this publisher practice is in violation of the "spirit" of web navigation. That spirit is that users should not be discriminated against based on their navigation source.
Google search results should not be a representation of content that is not allowed to direct visitors. If WSJ wants to represent to Googlebot and Google visitors that the content is open, then it should be open to direct visitors as well.
If I, a user, did nothing special to access the content, I should be able to pass on the link to a new set of users. This practice breaks that, and, I imagine almost invariably, users will not understand why.