[wubrr]

How would news organizations deny the request referred by a linking party? Are you talking about a technical denial - as in reject the HTTP request? I guess technically they can base something like this on HTTP referer header, but you can have links without referer info as well.

[cmrdporcupine]

Referrer is exactly how you would do it.

The idiocy here is that most of these publishers are likely customers of Google's ad networks anyways, and the clicks through to the articles are yielding ad revenue to them, and they likely are getting analytics and tracking that identifies exactly where the inbound traffic is coming from.

It feels like a shakedown by people who are in other parts of the business totally disconnected from the web content / publishing arms, who likely know better?

[wubrr]

Referrer is basically optional though, you can specify a link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways.

It's true that the links only increase the revenue/traffic to their website though, so they should really be supporting the referrers rather than blocking them.

[randomdata]

> you can specify a link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways.

But you wouldn't do that if you want the link to resolve. If you don't want it to work, why would you go to all of the trouble of creating the link in the first place?

[Dylan16807]

And block people that use a bookmark or share the link via chat programs? I think almost no sites would do that.

[randomdata]

They would if the users affected do not impact their bottom line. After all, the whole point of this is to keep out users who are not paying their 'fair share' via Google/Meta by proxy.

But also, the technical solution to bookmarks and small-scale sharing between friends is quite obvious. You don't need referrers to solve that problem.

[wubrr]

Huh? The link would still resolve and work, just the referrer header wouldn't be set.