In the run up to Camp Alphaville on July 1, we’re profiling the panels and discussions we’ve got lined up by trying to explain why we chose the subject in the first place.
So here’s the rationale and background to the “End of the Free Internet” panel which I will be moderating at noon on the day, featuring the FT’s chief commercial officer, Jon Slade, Deutsche Bank’s chief data officer JP Rangaswami, Ctrl-Shift’s strategy director Alan Mitchell, and Felix Salmon, senior editor at Fusion and general besserwisser.
The premise is simple: the days of free content, free web platforms, free digital services and freemium generally may be coming to an end.
The key to this about turn is the long term un-sustainability of cross-subsidised business models based on advertising or data resale, as well as the true cost of supporting and protecting our internet infrastructure from tragedy of the commons side-effects. When the bough breaks — and it will, because fixed costs are a real thing, people don’t like watching ads, and privacy is a big deal — the economic impact could be much more severe than anyone expected.
If and when that day arrives we suspect one of two things may happen:
- The data-based business model that a whole bunch of billion-dollar tech stocks have relied on for outsized valuations will be rendered moot. People will become aware of the fact that if it’s free they’re the product, and thus flee. The beneficiaries will be paid-for neutral services that cover their costs through direct fees for services rather than clandestine cross-subsidisation models based on monetising your data or influencing your behaviour with ads, until the user becomes a servile and mindless consumer whose consumption patterns fit those permitted in the system by your economic class and credit profile.
- People’s continuing resistance to overt ad consumption and the content industry’s pressure to cover costs leads to increasingly poor quality and biased content; the free and neutral press dies; critical thinking disappears entirely from the public sphere; the web becomes a giant false-reality propaganda machine in which nobody can be sure of anything and where those who can pay and command content creators to work to serve their interests, forwarding only those narratives that suit their agenda. Free thinking journalists, content producers and creatives are marginalised or forced to promote false narratives to make ends meet. The public sphere is entirely compromised. Your data becomes a means by which a small technocratic elite gets to decide what’s good for you on your behalf. Democracy itself is compromised.
In this panel, as a consequence, we’ll be asking the media practitioners what the price of neutrality really is? Did journalism and media, as Noam Chomsky has always claimed, shoot itself in the foot the day it opened itself up to ad-based cross-subsidisation? If people knew how they were being exploited and wanted to change things, how much financial capacity would they even have to do so? And if that capacity is low, is neutrality and critical judgment a luxury society can no longer afford? If yes, how and why did this happen? Do paid-for premium models have a duty of care not to resell data?
But we’ll also be exploring the data side of the story too. In a world where personal data is a commodity for resale in an international OTC market to the highest bidder, how can we be sure our interests are really being looked out for? And if you’re worried about media, what happens if and when our banks — the institutions we’ve historically always trusted with our privacy — begin to use and exploit the data they’ve accumulated about us as well? Will they use that data to sell us PPI or other products they engineer? Or will they package and resell it to commercial entities they think we can and should be manipulated by? Who will be making these choices and how? And how can we ever achieve social mobility if our current circumstances dictate the ads we get and the things we’re allowed to aspire to?
Lastly, we”ll also be exploring the low-quality information overload problem and asking whether, in the style of the penny press before it, this might eventually create a market for expertly curated and filtered content by entities that we trust?
Does the panel suit our own interests? Hell yes. At FT Alphaville we care about neutrality, critical judgment and high quality investigation, and it pains us to imagine a world where society no longer has the capacity or desire to allocate professional human capital to doing that job for all our benefit.
And in that regard, if you value neutral, free-thinking and provocative content lend us your support by buying a ticket and coming along. Remember, if it’s free, it’s not neutral. And if it doesn’t break-even, chances are it probably won’t be happening again.
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