(2019-08-09) Stoller: Google's War On Publisher Paywalls

Matt Stoller: Google's War on Publisher Paywalls. I think of it the way Australian enforcers did, which is as a multi-faceted conglomerate whose power comes from its ability to direct traffic between users and businesses. In this framework, Google is not a tech company, but a financial holding company that manages a bunch of different independent divisions. These divisions include YouTube, Maps, General search, Analytics, Ad services, Chome, Android/Play, Cloud, and so forth.

find ways to direct revenue and power to their own divisions. My colleague Sally Hubbard has given this self-preferencing a name: platform privilege.

One of the more obvious ways Google structures its divisions to privilege one another is through its use of Chrome, the browser with a dominant share in web browsing (roughly 60%).

if you are a web site, you will no longer be able to tell if someone is using incognito mode, which has a big impact on paywalls

Here’s how Google recommends publishers deal with this change: Sites that wish to deter meter circumvention have options such as reducing the number of free articles someone can view before logging in, requiring free registration to view any content, or hardening their paywalls.

Google is an online ad monopoly, but in this case, Google’s paywall management has little to do with whether publishers get advertising revenue. It has to do with how the financial holding company called Google sets the terms of conditions for how publishers relate to their subscribers.