12ft.io

» see 12ft.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The name came from a line Thomas Millar liked: show me a ten foot wall and I will show you a twelve foot ladder. He built the site in 2020 after noticing that eight of the top ten results on a Google search were sitting behind paywalls, which is an observation about search results rather than about journalism, and the fix he wrote followed from the observation exactly.

There was no account and nothing to install. You put 12ft.io in front of a URL and the page came back readable, with the ad layers and the newsletter overlays gone as well, which for a lot of people was the actual appeal. It ran on iOS from January 2021 alongside the web version.

By 2020 I had been online for twenty-two years and the thing that had changed most was not the speed. It was that reading had acquired a toll gate. The engineering in 12ft is trivial, a few lines in any HTTP library, so what made it interesting was never the code. It was that the code only worked because publishers had already agreed to hand the whole article over to somebody, as long as that somebody was a crawler.

~ the record ~

~ the trick ~

A paywalled article that hides itself from Google does not get indexed, and an article that is not indexed does not get read. So the standard arrangement is that Googlebot receives the full text while your browser receives a teaser and a subscribe button. Publishers have called this first click free or metered access depending on the year. 12ft asked for the page the way Googlebot asks for it and got what Googlebot gets.

This is why the tool was awkward for publishers to argue about cleanly. Nothing was taken off a server that had refused to give it up. It was served willingly and in full to a user agent string, and the only thing 12ft changed was who was holding the string.

~ the takedowns before the last one ~

Individual publishers got there first. Bloomberg and the New York Times blocked it, and by 11 September 2022 a New York Times link came back with a message saying 12ft had been disabled for that site. On 31 August 2022 the whole thing went dark behind an HTTP 451, the status code for unavailable for legal reasons, which is a rare code to see in the wild and an unambiguous one when you do.

On 2 November 2023 Vercel, which was hosting it, removed Millar's account access over a terms of service violation. That outage lasted about a month. The site was back before the end of December 2023 and stayed up for another year and a half.

~ the fourteenth of july ~

The last takedown did not go near a court. The News/Media Alliance, the trade body for American news publishers, went to the hosting provider directly, and the host locked the account on Monday 14 July 2025. The Alliance announced it three days later, describing 12ft as illegal circumvention technology that stripped paywalls, with its chief executive framing such tools as undermining publishers' ability to fund reporting.

No lawsuit was filed and no ruling exists. A trade association wrote to a hosting company, the hosting company agreed, and a site that five years of publisher blocking had failed to finish was gone in an afternoon. The domain has answered 404 ever since.

~ what it argued ~

Within a week the replacements were circulating in the same forums that had been posting 12ft links, which is what happens to a tool whose function is four lines long. Archive services and reader-mode bookmarklets still do parts of the job.

What died with the specific domain is the clearest version of an uncomfortable point. If a publisher hands the whole article to a crawler in exchange for traffic, the paywall it shows a reader is a policy and not a lock. 12ft.io existed to make that visible to anybody who could copy and paste, and the answer to it was a letter to a hosting company.

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