Producers constantly fight an uphill battle to threaten, lock down, beg, blame, and shame consumers into paying for content. They must play the role of cowboys, roping consumers with their lassos and dragging them in the desired direction, whether by threatening the users with lawsuits or wheedling readers into disabling ad-blocking software—which extends to not allowing them to read articles in a browser’s private mode. Although we continue to pay lip service to the idea that consumers should pay for software somehow, code struggles against its bonds, spurred perhaps by the famous
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