Apple App Store threatened to remove Grok over deepfakes: Letter

When the physical paper is gone and delivery is over the wire, free should in fact be doable.

Perhaps the local news fucked up by accepting Google ads. Had each regional, metropolitan area put together their own ad agency they could have served up local ads and likely kept something closer to their previous business model—likely reaped more dosh?

First, I almost never find subscriptions acceptable, but I would happily pay for downloading anything that I am interested in, after seeing a preview that would convince me that the content is worth it.

Second, the procedure for paying would have to be very simple and more importantly, the prices would have to be very low, e.g in most cases not significantly bigger than $1.

I can easily read many hundreds of articles per month, or even per day. A price of e.g. $30 per article is not feasible, except in very rare occasions, for something unusually valuable. In most cases even $10 would be too much for a single article.

I actually subscribe to a few paywalled libraries, but I frequently prefer to take the content that I am paying for from some pirate sites, because those have much faster content searching and instant downloading, while if I go on the sites for which I pay dearly, I waste a lot of time with inferior searching and especially with various slow and annoying steps for authorization.

An open web, to me, does not imply access to all websites.

Hard disagree. There are many more websites with paywalls that still exist today vs the ones that relied on ads or donations to survive.

>they break the promise of an open web

The open web was never a thing because it has always cost $$ to even connect to the web.

I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.

Perhaps some journalists have made the exact same argument to their landlords and at the grocery store. It probably didn’t go over very well.

Either pay or watch ads, which is it?

They would only assign journalists for important or local content.

The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.

It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.

They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.

Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.

The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.

[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.

The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!

News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.

The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e Big Tech) that link to news must pay.

Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-on...

This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.

Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?