Lawl.

I was googling around today, and stumbled onto the Times website. Upon trying to click on an article, I was reminded by a cheerful paywall that I needed to pay £1 in order to view the information I wanted. How ingenuous! This information was critical to my happiness at the time, so they would be able to wrangle a quid out of me that previously would have remained in my (metaphorical) pocket. Multiply that by the millions who would try to access similar articles in the coming days...the mind boggles at the profit!

Except...oh, wait. I just went onto the Guardian website, looked at the equivalent article (after all, news is news), and sauntered off, content. Oops. Looks like the Times just handed over a reader to one of their rivals. Plus now I don't like the Times any more because of their audacity, so I won't be buying their newspaper anymore. Another Guardian purchase instead. Multiply that by the millions who would do a very similar thing (albeit maybe buying another quality newspaper like...the Independent?) in the coming days...the mind boggles at the loss.

Silly old Rupert Murdoch, thinking he can still exercise the same level of tyranny and control over something on a scale far beyond anything he's ever known. Even if every other newspaper complied (including the BBC, despite the fact that it's included in our license fee), all it would take is for one blogger to cough up a quid and then post all the news articles on his own site. I guess they could close his website down in the end, but the idea would catch on and I'm not sure it's possible to regulate things, you know, the entire internet.

After all, it might turn out there's more than one reason it's called freedom of the press.