The Case for a ‘NOT FOR FREE’ Internet!

“The internet should be free!”

That’s the case that the big guys from Silicon Valley want you to root for.  The black lining on that silver cloud however, is that it’s akin to making a deal with the devil – where you essentially trade your soul - in this case, your most private and personal data – to access the internet for free!

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Tik-Tok, SnapChat, you name it. All these allow you “free” access to their portals where you end up sharing your most personal and privileged info with them – much beyond the casual name, age, gender and location. What machines can learn about you today goes way beyond that – what you like, who you support, where you physically are, what your personal and public opinions are, what and where you like to shop, where you like to eat, who your relatives are, where you are travelling to and so forth. I am sure that if Google or FB were just another guy you knew, you wouldn’t want them to know so much about you. Conversely, you wouldn’t want to be influenced by brands or marketers who leverage this info about you in order to make more money off you!

“Free” is just a fa?ade – you tend to cough up more than you realize!

The sad truth is that It does not end with your information. Most of these sites tend to turn a blind eye to sensitive, violent, racist and hate inciting posts, videos and blogs on their platforms – It is hard to believe that such websites, with the vast wealth of resources they have, cannot build tools or processes to control such content – I today share a humble opinion with many others, that it’s not that they can’t control it, but just that they won’t control it – so that they can grab their attention by giving them access to this  dark content that somehow feeds on the human mind – and like Ms. Erika Hall, CEO & Founder Mule Design shares with the NYTimes in a recent article - FB & Twitter lack an incentive to promote better relationships and a better understanding of relevant news, because they “make money through outrage and deception”. Nothing captures human attention better than these and attention is the keystone on which ads are sold.

Similar thoughts were echoed by the famous comic Sacha Baron Cohen. In his most recent speech at the Anti Defamatory League (ADL), where he launched a scathing attack on Facebook and the other Valley biggies, accusing them of providing global tools to promote “racism, hate and bigotry”, all to grab user attention and SELL MORE ADS!

Today, with data privacy restrictions and tighter regulations – government and regulators are trying hard to protect consumers. And it is only a matter of time before advertisers will start to shift their marketing budgets to less intrusive and therefore, safer zones. The humble mobile operator provides a much needed case in point here.

The mobile operator has been the safest pair of hands to entrust some very personal information of users. Guided by stringent policy & regulations, you would be pleasantly surprised to know just how safe your information rests in highly secure Data Centers, owned and operated by your mobile service provider. Up until now, they never took even the tiniest bit from the nearly $200bn+ digital advertising industry that they helped build for the internet giants that ride on their networks.

Recently, with operators foraying into this field, advertisers have started seeing a new way to reach their audience. Since operators are heavily regulated, and more importantly since advertising revenues aren’t core to their business, their model is far more fresh and novel as an approach – advertising without ditching consumer privacy.

In most countries, even the smallest operators have a larger base than Facebook in that geography. That’s second only to Google. Operators are now opening up access to their users through smart-tech which screens and removes personally identifiable traits of their consumers and make up for it by providing scale and competitive pricing rather than intrusive and prying pinpoints to their user traits, directly to advertisers. And being strictly regulated – unlike a Facebook or Google, they do not allow direct tools to advertisers to target audiences based on exposed metrics.

The mobile operator today hopes to fashion safe zones for customers by focusing on allowing access to advertisers for the benefit of their customers and not for just ad revenues – which primarily stokes the engines of Internet Ad-Based Publishers.

Unless this business of “free” comes to an end or at least the concept of gaining ad revenue “at any cost” is challenged, penalized and completely obliterated, we will stay in this vicious loop of inflammatory, speculative, fake and intrinsically recursive content.

Here’s a shout out to advertisers and brands to look at other, more ethical ways to advertise including what telecom operators are proffering with their advertising models. Let’s create an ecosystem that does not compromise on our personalities and feeds and vies for our attention by feeding our minds with malice, to stop giving in to the Devil’s Deal, and to find a better way to conduct business without “giving it for free!”