These are competing and potentially incompatible social contracts. As a hacker type who's been on the web a good while, I prefer the former: the client decides

These are competing and potentially incompatible social contracts. As a hacker type who's been on the web a good while, I prefer the former: the client decides how to render content, and the server should not send content it doesn't want rendered. This doesn't necessarily prohibit the use of paywalls: the paywalled site just has to be designed so that it only sends content to clients that have provided evidence of payment rather than relying on the content being rendered in a way that prevents the reader from reading all of it. Much as I'm for standards-compliant HTML rendering, I don't want any specific rendering encoded into law.