Maybe, but I think its a pretty easy distinction. They aren't even allowing all bots - they're allowing a white list of them. You're not just writing your own bot to get around it, you're pretending to be someone else's bot.

> But in practice, it seems they favor certain bots. Is it ok that the WSJ lets Google do things Google's competitors cannot?

That's the really important question. I personally have no context for answering except to say that I can see both sides argued. If you view their website as a physical store / private establishment, then I assume that they have every right to establish who has access to what and under what conditions.

Of course, that hampers a lot of legitimate use cases along the way.