When is free not free?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that, as Twitter this week finally offered its “Blue” subscription to customers in the United States and New Zealand, after testing it in Canada and Australia. Twitter put some real effort into providing news-loving users like me a reason to fork over $3 a month for a service that’s otherwise, well, free (sort of). That includes ad-free articles from media outlets like The Washington Post, BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone, and a feed of the most popular news items in your network over the past day — ensuring you won’t look clueless at tonight’s cocktail party.
There’s also an “undo” feature for preventing oopsie moments by allowing a tweet to be recalled within 30 seconds of sending it. And, I assume, more to come (including inevitable price hikes). Amazon Prime was pretty bare-bones when it debuted for $79 a year in 2005, but it now has some 200 million subscribers worldwide getting speedy shipping, streaming video and other goodies. YouTube’s seven-year-old Premium service, which cuts out ads, has tens of millions of users. Twitter is late to the party, but I am glad to see it getting serious about providing services its most dedicated users might want so much that they’ll pay for them.
With Twitter dipping its toes into paid subscriptions, it’s a good time to think more broadly about tech’s business models, which offer free services by shoveling gobs of data in the direction of marketers to underwrite them. It’s also a good time to think over how to responsibly regulate these mega-corporations.
In recent interviews I’ve had with a diverse set of thinkers such as Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at New York University; the futurist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier; lawmakers like Senator Amy Klobuchar; and others who know a thing or two about the digital sector, every single one zeroed in on what they said is the main problem with Big Tech: business models that hoover up personal data.
Of course, this is nothing new. Privacy concerns are why lawmakers around the world have in recent years been pushing back against the Googles and Facebooks that are incentivized to collect as much rich digital information as possible from their users. With the explosive growth of online advertising, we’ve been sliced and diced and labeled to help ensure we see only ads and content that we are sure to find “relevant.”
This has left companies like Facebook, er, Meta (ugh, I told you this was going to be hard) with what Damodaran correctly calls an “odious” reputation, because their sales growth ranks higher than any focus on consumer — and societal — protections. Lanier, for his part, calls it a “manipulative business model,” and Klobuchar has noted that we end up paying for anything free somewhere along the line. I applaud the shift in focus on how to build a business model and an economy that encourage better outcomes.
Still, the common excuse from tech leaders — particularly at Google and Meta — is that the “free” internet requires them to sponge up as much about us as possible. But I have long held that it only makes all of us cheap dates to these companies. Sure, we get digital maps or email, but like a craps table in Las Vegas, the house inevitably wins.
I have to hope Twitter’s Blue is a step toward a model that is less reliant on surveilling users. Aligning customer and business incentives ought to be viewed as a good thing, even if so much of the internet has grown up gobbling up data. Of course we have to be careful not to build premium services on the backs of customers who cannot really afford to pay for digital services — any paywall is, well, a wall.
They say there is no such thing as a free lunch; well, that’s never been more true than on today’s internet. But without any real regulatory oversight, why wouldn’t these fabulously profitable companies keep doing what they’re doing?
And while we’re dreaming of a better way … Jack Dorsey: For the love of late-night Twitter indiscretions, I will pay anything for editable tweets.
The New York Times
