Category: Internet

Electronic highway robbery : your money or your life!

When is consent freely given? Is the recent trend towards forced consent for access or face punitive subscription costs really fair and even legal?

Facebook is the most obvious example, but one of my weather apps is now following the same path. They want to use my info (not always clearly defined in scope or intent), or my agreement to a higher than comfortable monthly subscription, with an obvious pressure to agree to the former.

I don’t object to shotgun advertising (in moderation, not every other post) because I can simply ignore it. If it gets annoying I will block the advertiser, but I understand that some income is necessary to keep the services going. But my personal info, including location, interests and contacts, is just that: personal, not for public consumption. So my initial response is to deny everything and just stop using the service.

What is my value to Meta? Perhaps we should divide the turnover by the number of subscribers:?

2022 annual revenue was 116 billion, made from 3 billion monthly active users (MAU). Daily active users number around 2 billion. But most revenue comes from the US – nearly 50% of the income being generated by less than 10% of the user base. Note that the monthly charge does not apply to US users, being EU limited, maybe 15% of the user base.

Just going with the crude numbers, the 400 million EU user accounts for around 20% of the revenue, say 25 billion. So each user is responsible for just over $60 per annum, that works out to say $5 per month. Ok, that’s higher than I had originally imagined, but still only half of the demand for ad-free access. Again, I remind you that I can accept adverts, but not the use of my personal information, so this is really a double insult.

Facebook cookie consent, give us your personal info or we want a tenner a month for an ad free subscription (and we will probably resell your info anyway)

What is it with social media? It all starts so nicely, providing a platform to permit at least relatively free discourse, often for little or no charge. Funds are raised usually through advertising, and mostly people accept that they (or more correctly, information about them) are the product being sold to pay for the service.

All goes well for a while, a reasonable balance is obtained. Then something changes: maybe it’s greed, maybe a desire to control the narrative, and the disconnect between site owners and users comes into sharper focus.

In very recent memory Twitter was the obvious example: a system that had become ubiquitous, providing a quick and effective way of communicating between two parties, be that for personal or commercial use. Then a self-obsessed narcissist (is there any other kind) bought it out and proceeded to try and divert it to his own interests while also attempting to recoup his costs resulting from the purchase. His agenda succeeded in screwing the system up for everyone, driving both monetary value and utility down. Ok, it’s not dead yet, but it has suffered a significant drop in usefulness, at least in part from the loss of worthwhile input.

We’ve seen similar, if not as obviously self destructive, issues with other social media giants: Facebook and Flickr to name just two, the former lost trust, the latter value, as both tried to control what people could say or do.

Now Reddit: with an imminent IPO the management team obviously want to raise value. So what do they do? Alienate a significant group of people, content creators and subreddit moderators, by trying to force a ridiculous and clearly punitive rate for API access on third party app developers. These apps provide functionality that the native Reddit app lacks, very obviously, but often do so while also blocking adverts. This is viewed as one of their great advantages by the users, but as anathema by Reddit admins, as advertising provides income for the site. So in a clear and deliberate step Reddit gave an ultimatum to the third part app developers: you will pay us a punitive sum, and you will do it with only a month’s notice.

To be fair, most developers accept the need for API payments, but not at the inflated rates Reddit wants to charge, an order of magnitude more than the actual costs and lost profit to the company. Many would try and comply with a reasonable subscription model – but not with only a few weeks notice, it’s just impossible to retool and cover costs in the meantime.

This has played out badly for Reddit: in a rapidly developing spat between one the major 3PA developers and the CEO of Reddit, the latter accused the developer of threatening Reddit with blackmail. Unfortunately the dev had kept a (perfectly legal) tape of the conversations, something that disproved the allegations clearly. Not content though, the CEO doubled down on his story in a public AMA session – to be immediately challenged by the dev to back up his claims. The result was as might have been expected, dead silence from Reddit and an outcry from the people who had witnessed the disagreement.

The CEO has a history of editing others’ comments to make himself look good, displaying a megalomaniac tendency not unlike Elon Musk, and the AMA seems to have been an attempt to whitewash over the issue. However it has backfired spectacularly, the whole thing being a public shaming of his attitude and behaviour that won’t go unmissed by investors in any upcoming IPO. An opportunity to enhance the organisation’s value has turned into an indictment of the management’s ability and driven a significant wedge between the groups.

Undoubtably Reddit will survive this, as Twitter and many other mismanaged groups have done, but at the cost of driving users towards a more decentralised and open concept, something designed to avoid the sort of imposed control. So far the fediverse (don’t blame me, I didn’t come up with the name) hasn’t gained much public traction, but at some point in their history neither had the current social media giants. Just keep an eye open for Mastodon and Lenny, their or their successors’ time will come. Anyone remember MySpace or Digg? The same thing can and will happen to Twitter and Reddit as freer alternatives build up support and the old guard entrenches itself ever further in the pursuit of profit at the expense of service.

In order to be completely fair, I have to grant (with some reservations) that Google eventually did the right thing, and reversed their blanket decision to drop the Legacy accounts. As it stands, Legacy accounts intended for personal use remain free from monthly fees. This was a sort of last minute decision, not published particularly transparently, and comes with some caveats.

The first restriction, and it’s something that I think many if not all personal users will accept, is that the accounts must only be for personal use. I know this will affect any number of small (and some not so small) businesses that have relied on the accounts for maybe ten or more years, but there’s an understandable rationale to charge for a service used in the chase for profit. How many of these businesses offer their own services for free? Yes, it will impact on some small, one or two-man, close to the edge, operations, but Google have effectively supported many larger organisations for years and have chosen to draw a mainly clear and inarguable line. Personal use – free, non-personal – you pay.

The second concern is a little less straightforward. Google have said they may withdraw some ‘business’ functionality, without clarifying what they mean by that. If you are at all paranoid (like me) then you start looking at the custom domain email service. Google would like nothing more than to have everyone using a gmail address, and there’s still the possibility that they’ll introduce a charge to retain the custom email domain later. We will face that when it happens, but to me this still smacks of a foot in the door towards making the Legacy accounts unviable.

In typical Google fashion the entire reversal remains fraught with problems. For many people the actual process to confirm their personal use failed (and seems to still be doing so – with many reporting that this option is no longer available now). They’ve also made a hash of reverting accounts for people who had, due to the pressure applied beforehand, already updated to a paid option. That should, in theory, be easy to fix, but no, there’s confusion over whether or not some accounts are free or whether they will be charged going forward. Then there’s the whole question of those who migrated, at financial and time cost, to other services. I think Google can forget tempting them back, given that there is no way of compensating for the effort wasted – but then perhaps Google prefers not to have to provide the free service any longer, and are looking to as future where they can say that demand has dropped and the provision is no longer needed…

Yet another rant about cookie use on websites! Any site that uses an ‘accept all’ or default accept for cookies should also have an equally visible and accessible ‘reject all’ button. No discussion!