By: Jonathan Margolis / The Independent
Translation: Telegrafi.com
There’s nothing more annoying than being forced to pay for something that was once free.
Users of Snapchatare frustrated by the news that they will soon have to pay to store their old videos and photos – if they exceed the 5GB limit. Snapchat-i stated that its “Memories” feature already stores a trillion pieces of material, which is not cheap to keep secure. But the company is being widely accused of corporate greed.
There are hundreds of examples of consumer discontent from the time of Ancient Rome to the present day. In Rome, water, public baths, and even grain were free. Whenever word spread that a fee would be imposed for these basic services – especially for free grain – riots broke out.
When pay toilets were introduced in Victorian England at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – for a penny you got a clean toilet, a towel and a shoe shine – there was great outrage over the innovation. A penny was the cost of a day’s food for the poor.
In our time, the internet started as a completely free service – and much of it continues to be so. By 2008, the idea of the “free economy” was being seen by some as the future.
However, at the same time other influential voices – among them technology gurus Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky, as well as leading authors in Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal – argued that “free” is not a sustainable economic principle and that businesses, in the end, should be paid.
Shirky loved the free model, but he acknowledged that it could only last until “the subsidy runs out” — meaning advertising, venture capital, or simply the patience of investors. You could compare this to the day your parents suggest that maybe you should contribute a little rent to live in their house — now that you’re no longer a poor student, but you have a job.
Of course, one way to make money from online services is to be crafty. When you see the range of things that Google offers us – seemingly for free – from search to maps, translation, email to artificial intelligence, this seems like a wonderful thing.
But it’s not. As smart tech analysts have been saying – in various guises since 1999: if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer – you’re the product being sold. In other words, in order to get your data, your details, your location and your preferences as a consumer, it’s worth offering you some services for free.
In tech, we’ve already seen a lot of free stuff become paid for, from news to entertainment to sports broadcasts. We’re asked every day if we want to pay to remove annoying ads, and if you’re not careful – or willing to grit your teeth to see the same unbearable ad multiple times a night – you’ll find yourself paying a hefty sum each month in scary subscriptions.
Snapchat-ie released a rather surprising explanation for its decision to introduce a data storage fee. “These changes will allow us to continue investing in improving Memories for our entire community,” it said in a blog post.
Perhaps it would be smarter to use a phrase in the style of Greta Thunberg and publish some details about the environmental cost of keeping all this material on servers – which is no small thing, especially if users rarely open their old clips.
When you think not only about the privacy concerns of the way the online world has developed, but also about the flood of garbage and misinformation, it’s not hard to imagine a completely private, more selective and uncorrupted internet opening up – a bit like the private and well-paved section of the M6 motorway that allows toll-payers to avoid the traffic around Birmingham.
There is already at least one guaranteed private search engine and a “clean” browser, for a fee, and it is not at all inconceivable that, like a private health system alongside the NHS, this kind of thing will quickly become more common.
The search engine is called kagi, its partner browser, Orion, and they cost $10 [8.54 euros] a month, promising no tracking and no selling of data. The founder, a California-based Serbian engineer, Vladimir Prelovac, believes that Google is “an insult to people’s intelligence.” “We have been unaware for two decades that Google “It’s not optimized for us as consumers, but for advertisers,” he says.
kagi It’s still very small – around 50 users so far – but it’s profitable and very popular. Some have even declared it the best search engine you can get.
At first use, it’s not easy to understand why Kagi is considered by some to be the best search engine available. It has few features, but once you use it, you quickly come to rely on the simple, honest, and highest integrity results it provides.
Snapchat-i may be the first app of its kind to break the mold and do what a business should, ultimately, do. But there will be others to follow. /Telegraph/