Paywall? What paywall?

Finally hit the NYTimes 20-article limit this evening. In place of the URL of the page I was visiting, up came another URL, suspiciously like the first, but with "?gwh=" and a string of 32 (who'd have guessed?) alphanumeric characters. Then the very pretty alert box comes up, blocking the page, and telling me that I've hit the magic number.
"Gee," I wonder, "what would happen if I just deleted that whole last bit from the question mark on?"
What happens is that the page I wanted just comes back, without the warning.
1. Why bother? Are people that bad at using their browsers that this would be effective?
2. Why pay $40M for this?

Oh, and if you're quick, you can hit command-. to cancel the page load before it hits the warning, but after the content you want to read as loaded.