[uniqueid]

  Should Google remove medium.com from search results?

Maybe.

My question is: if we designed the internet and web from scratch, how would we deal with paywalled pages?

It might be valuable, for example, to create a separate protocol for paywalled content (eg: ""cc:"" instead of "http://") and add road-blocks to discourage paywalled sites from using the wrong protocol. That would allow search-engines to filter search results according to the user's preference.

[Lurkars]

At least there is http status code 402 Payment Required. But I think no host want to set an error code as return code for an existing, working page.

[tomjen3]

If we designed the internet from scratch, we should build some way to pay into the protocol, e.g send a header with the payment required info, and then my browser could handle the rest.

It would also make it easy for search engines to label such results, filter them when necessary and hopefully we could avoid so many ad pay sites.

[ethanwillis]

I think part of the problem is with Google eating the ad business. It seems (from my childhood as a comparison point) that if someone needed to profit off of their content it was fully supported by ads and that was fine.