The problem is that Google didn’t give news publishers a lot of warning that it would be making this change. Google had its own suggestions for news publishers: harden your paywalls or requires users to log in with free registration before they can view any content. “Since incognito browsing circumvents soft paywalls, and therefore free-sampling opportunities, publishers may be forced to build hard paywalls that ultimately make it harder for readers to access news online,” Chavern said. You might end up seeing more of those hard paywalls, which have rarely been used until now. I tested it.) Slate uses a freemium model. (You can’t bypass it with the new Chrome. The Wall Street Journal, for example, had a hard paywall until 2016 and still sort of does. Neither of those relies on cookies so they can’t be circumvented by Incognito Mode. Two others options might emerge as newspapers respond to Google’s changes: the freemium model, in which some premium content is behind a paywall and other content is free, or a hard paywall, in which all content is behind a paywall, and you can’t read anything for free.
