I'm not saying anything a paywall: if it is "pay for everything", then you're right, it can be built very effectively. What they're saying is that they want to give free capped usage for users, and I'm thinking that whatever mechanism they think of can probably be circumvented easily.
Most people would rather be honest and pay a few dollars than mess with cookies/proxies/multiple accounts, especially if they don't know what a cookie is in the first place.
If someone values his time sufficiently low to make several email accounts to read the NYT without paying... he probably can't/won't pay, whatever is done.
That's a very fair point. My only counter to it is that us geeks will spread the word that using Chrome in incognito mode is quite effective.
Ctrl-Shift-N is quite fast, and Google is pushing Chrome very hard, and us geeks are called on for tech support quite often.
I think your honesty thought will win out most of the time, but not always. People like a free lunch and sticking it to the man, especially if they have the tools to do it very easily. We'll see.