Paywalls are a big problem

I remember back in the days of the early internet in the 1990's the concept of news, information and things that where beneficial to being a well informed person, being behind a paywall would have been a very foreign idea. How did we let that happen? Why should I have to pay for information, unless the goal is to keep us from being truly informed. This should not be a new concept — people like Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and of course, George Orwell, warned us that the elite can maintain power more easily when ordinary people do not possess enough information to recognize or challenge how power operates. Sadly, awareness does not necessarily produce resistance. Aldos Huxley in Brave New World asks what happens when people know what is happening but fail to act on that knowledge? He then writes that "we know what ought to be done" then asks the heart of the matter by asking, “Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?” Four centuries earlier, French…