Bug Off?

When the New York Times launched its online edition in January 1996, it started a trend, albeit one that lay dormant for several years. Although free, Nytimes.com required that users fill out a registration form with personal information before accessing the website. The primary purpose of this policy was to make the website more attractive to advertisers, as explained in a February 20, 2002 presentation given at a Seybold conference by none other than Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. himself, chairman and publisher of the Times:

What advertisers are also discovering is that we can help them speak to very specific segments of our audience. For instance, one of the basic premises of NYTimes.com’s online registration philosophy is the notion of user acquisition, targeting and retention. Our proprietary decision support system allows advertisers to precisely target those categories of users who fall into the demographic and psychographic profiles most relevant to their marketing objectives.

In my recollection, the Time’s decision to require registration did not provoke many objections at the time, beyond a certain amount of passive-aggressive griping on Slashdot, where any reference to Nytimes.com is still followed obsessively by the disclaimer “registration required”. Eventually other publications followed suit, with biggies like Chicagotribune.com (March 2002) and Latimes.com (April 2002) leading the charge.

The result is a bit like a virtual tragedy of the commons, where the “commons” in this case is the willingness of the public to spend time filling out the same damn web form on every news site they visit. When it was just Nytimes.com, people were prepared to put up with the aggravation, but their precious patience was quickly used up once the Poughkeepsie Post and the Boise Bulletin jumped on the bandwagon.

Another factor is the growing popularity of news aggregation websites like Google News. I used to read one or two online papers regularly (NYT and Wired News, which has never required registration), as well as hitting the big news network or newswire sites like CNN and Reuters. Now, I just breeze over to Google News and check out which headlines sound most interesting. So I end up reading papers like the Kansas City Star and Detroit Free Press which I previously never even knew existed.

The bottom line is that the need to constantly register for this and that publication and keep track of the resulting 4 zillion passwords has become unbearable. This leads us to:

Gertner’s First Law: Any sufficiently annoying problem will be solved immediately by technology, provided that there is some way to take advantage of network effects.

File sharing networks are a good example of this. All of the successive generations (Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, Bittorrent) have been extraordinarily sensitive to network effects, i.e. the value of the network is directly related to the number of users (or rather to the square if we believe Metcalfe’s Law). As a result of this and the tangible desire on the part of consumers to have access to an open file exchange (as opposed to subscriptions or DRM-crippled content), all of the above-mentioned systems have been stupendously successful.

With little fanfare, a website appeared last November to combat the increasingly onerous online registration system. Bugmenot.com also exploits network effects by making login credentials entered into the system available to all other users. So the more people use it, the more valuable it is. As predicted by Gertner’s First Law, its popularity has risen exponentially, with over 22,000 sites now tracked according to their homepage. There are even Bugmenot extensions for Mozilla and Internet Explorer that make bucking the system even easier.

Bugmenot sprang into the collective consciousness this June, when a slew of articles appeared about the growing number of sites requiring online registration and the correspondingly popularity of systems to circumvent this requirement. This was when I first started using the service, and it changed my life (albeit in a rather minor way, nothing like winning the lottery or the Olympic gold medal for solo synchronized swimming). Prior to this, I simply wouldn’t read any articles that required me to register beforehand.

Now I suppose I should at least mention that from the perspective of the newspapers, online registration must seem eminently fair and justified. After all, they are paying journalists to write copy, editors to clean it up, designers to make it pretty and techies to put it onto the web, and they’re not charging us a red cent to read it. Surely the least we can do is provide them with some innocuous personal information, once and only once, before taking advantage of their generosity. This might have been true back in the olden days when a modicum of brand loyalty still existed, but now that peripatetic surfers flit freely between news sites, the nuisance of filling out the same facts again and again is simply not worth it. Especially when Google News is informing me that it has “1540 related” articles, some of which are surely available without registration.

The punchline is this: Bugmenot.com went offline a few days ago, apparently because their ISP pulled the plug in response to mysterious outside pressure. And guess what? Before you could say “Gertner’s First Law”, it was back online on a new provider called nearlyfreespeech.net.

So do I feel a tad guilty about swindling the hardworking online press? Maybe a bit. But is it my fault if the cost/benefit ratio of their registration policies is a massive motivation for cheating? For the record, here’s how it should work:

When I go onto a new website requiring registration, a little popup dialog appears:

Of course, this would require a whole new approach to managing online identity, so it isn’t going to happen any time soon.

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