What I find annoying about paywalled sites is that they provide the full content to Google. And Google is OK with indexing the full content, even though it is not available on the internet, and even though they explicitly forbid the practice of showing different content to a search engine from what is available publicly.
Paywalled sites are just fine, but they are not part of the open Internet, and should not pretend to be.
Yeah, 100% agree with this. It's like these sites want to have their cake and eat it, and both get the traffic the 'open web' provides while not having to actually share any of their work there.
It's like if you needed an app to view a page, yet Google had all its content indexed. Why is that (rightly) seen as unreasonable while charging users for content you provide to bots for free isn't?
Sometimes the full content is available - but only if you navigate to it via a Google results page, and you don't have existing cookies implementing a "free article limit".
Paywalled sites are just fine, but they are not part of the open Internet, and should not pretend to be.