Google has quietly launched a new service, Google Contributor, and it’s based on an intriguing proposition: for a small monthly fee, you won’t see any ads on the websites of its partners. The fee, naturally, is split between Google and those sites – but only if they are actually visited. As Google puts it, this is all “an experiment in additional ways to fund the web”.
The experiment isn’t revolutionary. Wikipedia, with its ideological opposition to advertising, heavily relies on donations from readers. Premium members of Reddit, another popular site, could pay a fee and skip the ads. Google’s own YouTube channel has begun offering its paying customers an ad-free version – at a fee, of course. The fans can now also send money to their favourite artists.
Given that advertising remains Google’s main source of revenue, the new service has befuddled many analysts. Could Google really be worried about its future? It has had an amazing decade. But how long this financial bonanza will last is anyone’s guess; from an advertising viewpoint, browsing on smartphones is not as profitable. Besides, ad blockers – clever browser extensions for blocking intrusive ads – already allow users to cleanse their browsers of any unwanted clutter.
Google Contributor is certainly a clever publicity ploy. Giving publishers a simple tool to raise money can create some goodwill – which is exactly what Google needs as its advertising-based model gets hammered by Europe’s publishing industry. In France, Google has already had to open its coffers and promise French publishers to invest millions in new journalistic ventures. In the end, it’s becoming harder to accuse Google of destroying the media industry: the company can always turn the tables and accuse publishers of being too slow to embrace change.
More importantly, Google Contributor is probably part of Google’s delicate repositioning in the wake of the post-Snowden backlash. Advertising – rather than the messy entanglement between institutions of the deep state and those of digital hypercapitalism – has emerged as everyone’s favourite scapegoat. And more: we are assured that a world free of advertising could help us cash all those expired and bouncing cheques of the once-defunct cyber-utopian enterprise!
The case against advertising was made most cogently by MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman in a recent essay called “The Internet’s Original Sin”. Arguing that “users will pay for services that they love”, Zuckerman’s argument is simple: paying for our services upfront – rather than getting them for free but underwritten by online advertising – could help reverse the inexorable move towards “a web that is centralised, ad supported and heavily surveilled”.
It’s a curious framing. After all, many publishers of original content – the likes of the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal – have never swallowed the cyber-utopian pill, happily charging subscription fees to their users. But Zuckerman’s essay has little to say about such sites. Instead, it focuses on services that provide the rudimentary cognitive infrastructure for our communal existence: social networking, bookmarking, blogging. It’s for their services that we are invited to pay.
And pay we might – but would it solve the problem of surveillance? Probably not. Zuckerman’s implicit bet is that the providers of fee-based services wouldn’t need to know what’s passing through their pipelines; they might, for example, deploy what’s known as “end-to-end encryption”, making it harder for the spooks to gather all the data.
The feasibility of this option rests entirely on its acceptability to lawmakers – and the kind of scale that can truly “save the web” will surely frighten them to death. But the lawmakers will invoke Islamic State (Isis), Ebola – or both – to argue that no company should be allowed to keep authorities in the dark. In fact, they already invoke such defences – and at a disturbingly increasing rate. However flawed and unappealing their reasoning, they still call the shots, which means that surveillance abuse will probably continue. Tinkering with business models is no way to deal with dysfunctional politics.
Second, while one can imagine Google souring on advertising, it’s harder to imagine it souring on data tracking – the two are not the same. Today, virtually everything Google does revolves around data collection and data personalisation. From smart thermostats to smart cars, its flagship products take constant, always-on, real-time streams of user data for granted.
Can these services be funded differently? Yes – but cut off from their data streams, they would no longer be smart and adaptable.
Google Now, the company’s fascinating virtual assistant, makes its clever predictions only because other Google services constantly generate the underlying data. Similar logic applies to wearables, self-tracking gadgets, and various components of the internet of things. Advertising might eventually help subsidise the costs of these products but they will continue spying on us all the same. And even if we replace ads with subscription fees, they will still keep spying – that’s the only way for them to provide the expected service.
Finally, there’s the question of politics. To think in binary terms of advertising and subscription fees is to frame the problem solely as one of consumer action. That certain historical forces have left us with just those two options is no reason to accept them in perpetuity. If some of these services are, indeed, infrastructure providers, we can also think of alternative ways to own, run and fund them. Several recent political campaigns around other types of infrastructure – from water to energy – prove that it’s possible to have them controlled by the public rather than rapacious profit-making firms.
When we rely on common infrastructure – say, a public convenience – should our choice be between watching a personalised ad or paying an entrance fee? This, after all, might be the case in a truly “smart city”. It’s easy to rationalise both gestures by invoking generosity, the gift economy, or the need to pay our share. What most of us forget is that we have already paid that share: it’s called tax. This is how infrastructure used to be financed – at least before our money went to bail out the banks. Besides, taxes and Silicon Valley don’t go together to begin with. With no other viable political options, it’s no wonder that we are forced to experiment “with additional ways to fund the web”. What else is going to fund it?
But do we want to live in a world where our access to basic goods, and even each other – which is precisely what our common cognitive infrastructure provides – is mediated solely by the market, either in the form of advertising or fees? Most of us easily grasp the implications of this logic when applied to physical spaces and services – and yet, having bought into the neoliberal fantasies of Silicon Valley and its cheerleaders, our intuition fails us on most things digital. At this rate, we would soon be paying both for our intelligence services and the tools that protect us from them.
Putting questions of infrastructure and ownership at the heart of the contemporary digital debate won’t be easy. It will require, invariably, creating institutions that can be trusted – not easy to do when our institutions abuse such trust every day. But even so: this is a more appealing proposition than internalising the neoliberal ethic of Google and its allies: for them, the only politics is that of the marketplace – and it is only our action as consumers – do you want to watch an ad or pay a fee? – that counts.
Advertising is not the “internet’s original sin” but neoliberalism might well be.