Not a whole lot of those doing groundbreaking work in the field. And there aren't many interested laymen. On the whole, it seems unlikely to cause any measurable harm to the future if said laymen cannot read academic papers for free.
Now contrast the simplicity of interacting with the most complex web application and the comparative overwhelming depth and difficulty of making novel findings in computer science.
People use quite simple tools for complex interactions with other human beings (e.g. facebook). Someone interested in research may use quite simple tools like evince to view the latest research papers.
