> I've never had trouble viewing an article in incognito mode, or sometimes even hitting stopping a load before javascript runs, so I've been under the impressi

> I've never had trouble viewing an article in incognito mode, or sometimes even hitting stopping a load before javascript runs, so I've been under the impression that it's mainly javascript trickery. My argument here was with that assumption, so perhaps it's moot. Typically publishers will use a combination of cookies and javascript to attempt to enforce a soft limit of X articles per month for normal users. Publishers also use UA sniffing to give unrestricted access to Googlebot and other crawlers. Circumventing the former by blocking cookies or javascript definitely should be legal, because the client should be control of their local computer. Spoofing requests to take advantage of the latter (which is what this specific extension is doing) isn't okay IMO. > The elephant in the room is that Google could easily setup a system whereby Googlebot got secure access to the articles. I think they haven't done this because of an idea that the same pages should be served to users. So who is defrauding whom? Something other users have suggested[1] in response to this article. Maybe that will happen in the future, but I think it's a whataboutism with regards to this specific incident. Google explicitly supports paywalled content[2], so I don't think it's fair to say that publishers are defrauding Google. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582893 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18584014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18584014