Well .. isn't that the same as TV has been for decades as the dominate media source? I don't think many people signed up for cable to watch TV news they were getting with their antenna for free/with ads. Cable just bundled news with it, so this business model where you either pay for no ads or get free content with ads has been around a long time now.. since radio and TV broadcasting came out. In that case the nature of the broadcasts made subscriptions too hard to pull off because all you needed is a receiver, but still the business model seems to have worked just fine for a long time. It might not produce the most integrity, but subscription only news means the majority of your citizens never sign up and get no news.. which in theory should be bad, but given the state of polarization might oddly work out better.

In principle, it sounds good. The problem is that laws are made generally by people who have no idea about how technology works. And even when they do, they don't want to. We're still struggling with laws for something as basic as network neutrality.

There's also a lot of wiggle room that would make it difficult for a one-size-fits-all law to cover and, more importantly, enforce. You'd be looking at needing some kind of agency that actually made sure the rules were followed and settled disputes.

Maybe it could be done on a good faith basis, the way that groups like the Writers Guild of America arbitrate cases among members. If you could get Google and a few other big players on board, you might have a groundswell. But there's a lot of incentive for big tech companies not to want to stop the free circulation of content when the only people they're really hurting are writers and readers, not themselves.

I'm glad that Google is at least trying. The problem with Google though is that they entrust making choices about content to an algorithm, and eventually people find ways to beat it. Like when they started measuring the time people spent on a site as an indicator of content quality, and sites started throwing a ton of fluff at you before they got to the actual information to prolong your visit. (If you've ever wondered why some sites/articles have a recap of the entire history of Samsung before some bit of news about the newest phone, or a long rambling personal story before a recipe for biscuit dough... that's a big reason why.) If there's a way to exploit the rules, people will find it. So I guess you could say I'm on the skeptical side to any kind of automated solution; machine learning only goes so far against human cleverness.

> Curious: what career did you segue too after tech journalism?

To be perfectly honest, I started taking entry level factory jobs to make ends meet. I'm currently looking for another of those, because I don't expect any of the copywriting jobs I've applied for to come through for me, nor any of the remote customer service stuff. So that, and hoping that my next novel meets some success.