I hear you and I understand the technical aspects of it but I think you're making the false assumption that Google indexing == content is public. That may be th

I hear you and I understand the technical aspects of it but I think you're making the false assumption that Google indexing == content is public. That may be the user expectation, but that doesn't mean it's true. Am I off base here? I'm having a hard time envisioning a scenario where giving Google exclusive data will be in any way good for content creators and site owners in the long term. If we took it a step further and gave google private direct feeds from publishers, would you then be OK with the automatic moat around Google's services that would then be built? How about the one that formed from the private subscription data that you needed to feed to them for them to tailor their searches to your preferences? What if they started charging for search? Would you then go to another search engine that did not have the private content feeds and could not, by design, find those relevant paywalled results? edit: Just to reiterate, I'm not defending the paywall practice (or breaking it, for that matter). I just see this practice pushing paywalls to be hard rather than soft.