The era of ‘free’ internet is over – here’s why everything you store online is at risk

The world wide web started as a wholly free service – but those who are used to carefree storage of their cherished photos and videos up there on the cloud may be in for a nasty shock, writes Jonathan Margolis

There is nothing more annoying than having to pay for something that was once free.

Snapchat users are upset by the news that they will soon have to pay for storing their old videos and photos if they exceed 5GB. Snapchat said its “Memories” feature now has a trillion pieces of content stored on it, which is not a cheap proposition to keep safe. But they are being widely accused of corporate greed.

The users’ disgruntlement has hundreds of precedents from Roman times to now. In Rome, water, public baths and even grain were free. There were riots whenever there was any word of charging an economic rate for these basics, especially the free wheat.

When, in Victorian England, paid toilets were exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – for a penny, you got a clean toilet, a towel and a shoe-shine – there was outrage about the innovation. A penny was the cost of a day’s food for the poor.

Snapchat will soon charge users for storing their old videos and photos if they exceed 5GB (AP)

In our time, the internet started as a wholly free service – as a huge amount of it still is. By 2008, the idea of “the economics of free” was being seen as the way of the future by some.

Other influential voices at the same time, however – among them the tech gurus Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky, as well as leader writers for the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal – argued that “free” is not a sustainable economic principle, and that businesses will eventually have to charge.

Shirky loved the free model but admitted that it could last only until “the subsidy runs out” – meaning the ads, the venture capital, or just the patience of investors. You could equate the latter to the day when your parents suggest you might like to contribute a little rent for living in their house, now that you’re no longer a poor student but have a job.

Of course, one way to monetise online services is on the sly. When you look at the range of stuff that Google gives us seemingly for nothing – from search to maps to translation to email to AI – it seems almost miraculous.

Except it’s not. As canny tech analysts have been saying in various forms since 1999, if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer – you’re the product being sold. In other words, to acquire your data, your details, your location and your consumer preferences, it’s well worth giving you a few free services.

In tech, we have already seen a raft of free stuff become chargeable, from news to entertainment to sports coverage. We are asked daily if we want to pay to get rid of the annoying ads, and if you’re not careful – or prepared to grit your teeth to see the same excruciating commercial several times a night – you’ll find you’re paying out a heck of a lot each month in the dreaded subscriptions.

Snapchat put out a rather awkward, PR-ey explanation for its move to charge for storage. “These changes will allow us to continue to invest in making Memories better for our entire community,” it said in a blog post.

It might have been cleverer to use a Greta Thunberg-esque line and put out some details of the environmental cost of keeping all this material on server farms – which is not inconsiderable, especially if users are rarely accessing their old clips.

When you consider not only the parlous privacy aspects of the way the online world has developed but also the tide of junk and misinformation out there, it’s not hard to see a whole private, more select and non-corrupt internet opening up – a bit like the private, smoothly paved length of the M6 that enables toll-payers to avoid the traffic around Birmingham.

There is already at least one “clean”, guaranteed private, paid-for search engine and browser available, and it’s far from inconceivable that, like a private health system alongside the NHS, this kind of thing could swiftly become more common.

The search engine is called Kagi, its partner browser, Orion, and they cost $10 (£7.45) a month, promising no tracking and no sale of data. The founder, a California-based Serbian engineer, Vladimir Prelovac, believes Google is “an insult to people’s intelligence”. “We’ve been oblivious for two decades that Google is not optimised for us consumers, but for advertisers,” he says.

Kagi is still tiny – some 50,000 users so far – but it’s profitable and greatly loved. Indeed, it’s been proclaimed by some as the best search you can get.

At first use, it’s not easy to see why Kagi has been judged by some as the best search available. There are few features, but when you use it, you soon start to rely on the straightforward, honest, higher-integrity results you get.

Snapchat may be the first app of its type to break the mould and do what a business has – eventually – to do. But expect more to follow.