crisscross - 2:56 pm on Nov 26, 2004 (gmt 0)

I find it difficult to believe that newspapers will give up subscription revenues so easily.

As the owner of a news site I suspect (ok, I hope) that we will soon see the introduction of large scale news subscription systems, One challenge is to make an unobtrusive system that allows user to access the news they want for a reasonable fee. Another challenge is to actively deny users access to content.

We have been talking with newspapers in our region to create a kind of AdultCheck system that lets our set of online newpapers or magazines share a single subscription. Perhaps later systems can be flexible enough system that a reader can get some of their news from CNN, some from Slashdot and some from Webmasterworld and so on. But it means that a lot of people will have to do without "free" news for a while. Otherwise we will have a tragedy of the commons, where the entire system will fail because everyone is reading news but no-one is paying for it.