That's not a bad thing.

The big tech companies are edging towards complete monopolies in their spaces and a significant part of this is that they know everything and they're allowed to leverage that data. Why would you go to anybody else to advertise? Unbundling this, making advertising harder again will spread out the budget, probably push more towards publishers rather than networks. Again, not a bad thing.

It also means that new players get to compete. It's been very tough to compete with similar services on price when the incumbents can operate at zero "cost".

Not having your data traded under the table is just gravy.

I think it would be a pretty horrible thing if all these once free internet services suddenly cost money. Nobody seems to be thinking about the significant amount of people who wouldn't be able to afford monthly subscriptions to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. even if it did all add up to "only" $15/month. Poor people should not be priced out of the online spaces where modern discourse happens. Single mothers should not be priced out of getting to post baby pictures on Facebook. I think it's indicative of living in bubbles that nobody else seems to be giving this consideration any weight.

Currently the price we all collectively pay for these “free” services is a decrease in the sanity of public discourse. Is that really a better option?

How would subscription fees improve the discourse on social media sites?

Currently, social media users are the goods being sold, so the companies running the networks don’t have much interest in offering tools and algorithms for high quality discussion. With paying customers the situation would be very different. (Not that it’s going to happen – I’m just saying that we already pay a hefty price for the “free” services.)

If I had to test that hypothesis I would consider the comments section on the NYT (a website that requires a subscription to access more than 10 articles a month). Just checking the comments section there shows that people are just as vitriolic there _even_ if they've posted on more than 10 articles that month.

I'm comfortable saying that paid networks won't in-and-of-themselves improve conversation.

What this bill might help (or at least give law enforcement additional tools to prosecute with) is preventing situations like the Cambridge Analytica situation, where corporations with nefarious motives gather user profile information from social media in questionable ways, and use these tools to try to manipulate in areas outside of mere marketing.

In other words, while I'm not sure if this will improve discourse, at least it mitigates a little bit of the questionable social media meddling that we've seen of late.

I kind of see jimmaswell's point that there is a risk of creating a "tiered Internet". But I'm not sure it's completely an either/or situation. It sounds like that the bill also emphasizes more transparency on what is being done with the data and who it is sold to. As long as personal data is not shared haphazardly and in a leaky fashion, consumers might be just fine with the bargain they get.

Things like shopper loyalty programs already offer this sort of bargain: in exchange for allowing companies access to more granular shopper information, the shopper gets access to greater discounts. Loyalty programs currently are subject to various consumer protection rules. In contrast, the bargain social media has struck with users (free service in exchange for marketing data) is not well protected.

Personally, I'm fine with a little more transparency and disclosure in this fashion. I don't think this necessarily means the end of free social media per se. (I will say though that this is a sign, one of many, that the days of social media "moving fast and breaking things" is over.)

Given "the discourse" currently includes inflammatory crap by bots pulling people's strings, even a small monetary barrier to entry might slow that down.

They could still be freemium, or could use less targeted advertising. Would it be a catastrophe if Mark Zuckerberg only made $20B off Facebook instead of $40B?

Also, today, privacy conscious users are cut off from the main forums of discourse. Is that better?

People who refuse to use these services out of privacy concerns are still a fringe minority.

I would expect it to drive monopolization, since you now have to have resources and competency in yet another thing. Seems like it would be harder on incumbents.

EDIT: since people are downvoting this, I should clarify that I’m not advocating against the policy, it just doesn’t seem intuitive to me that this policy would reduce monopolization (data privacy may well be worth the tradeoff). If I’m wrong I’d love to be corrected!

Not only that:

1) It encourages companies to be silent or remain ignorant.

2) I didn't see anything mentioned about the cyber-sec aspect, but I would imagine this will put a bounty on the heads of the largest companies.

Perhaps I watch too many (bad?) movies but shorting a stock on the cusp of being hacked could be lucrative.

That would be a very positive consequence.

Very true in some cases, i.e. unrollme. But I also like free content and am mostly willing to trade a little privacy for access.

I think the trade-off should be a lot more explicit though, e.g. you get to choose whether pay 5€ per month or your usage data gets sold.

If you want to be GDPR compliant I don't think you can do that. If you offer the "usage data gets sold" option you also have to make that full opt-in _and_ not deny the service if they don't opt-in.

Is charging a (reasonable) fee 'denying the service'?

Possibly.

Under GDPR, if your data processing is based on user consent, then that consent must be given freely. That means you should provide equivalent service, regardless of consent being given. Providing one service for free and another for a fee is not equivalent, so I'd argue that such consent would be invalid, as it was not freely given.

However, consent is only one of several conditions for processing data. Another would be "legitimate interests" of the business. If you choose to process data based on it, then you do not need consent at all. In such case you can provide separate services: free with data sharing, and paid without data sharing.

The trick here is that you actually need to be able to prove that "legitimate interests" of your business require collection and processing of that data. And additionally such interests are overridden by "fundamental rights and freedoms" of users. Which is probably why most businesses went the consent route, as it appears to be more clear-cut.

Thanks a lot for the insight, wasn't familiar with the GDPR logic. I think it'd be very hard to make a business case for processing non-paying users only so it's pretty easy to understand the consent option now.

Or it could make things more transparent.

Twitter wouldn’t need to pretend that it didn’t know that a substantial part of its user base is fraud-bots if it just charged some nominal fees for something other than advertising.

That sounds like the renaissance we've all been waiting for. Every would-be entrepreneur's wet dream is a $20/month subscription for Facebook.

i would pay $2/month at most for facebook.

$50bn/year would be more revenue than fb had in 2017, though of course the majority of their 2.23bn monthly users would disappear if asked for $.01/mo.

It is an interesting thought experiment, though, to consider what facebook would look like if its revenue was derived from convincing users that it was worth a monthly subscription.

I remember when Facebook was still figuring itself out, back in the day, users could purchase digital gimmicks directly there, to send to other users. Some "pokes" or emojis or something like that,

I topped up my FB balance with like $2 or $5 dollars, in ?2006?. When Facebook (quickly) discontinued that silliness, my account silently disappeared. MARK ZUCKERBERG, YOU OWE ME MONEY!

Running Facebook would become much cheaper if they could focus on being a social network instead of being an ad selling business. Right now they have to do both.

I think you're right. When they bought Instagram, it had less than 20 employees because all they had to do was keep the service running.

I compare that with Twitter at the time had two thousand employees. It makes no sense to me.

That cost is actually spot on: Facebook, for US users, makes about $26 per user per year IIRC.

I know the majority of people I know have at least 2 fb accounts. And then considering bots and other things. I'd imagine then that at least double your quoted amount per real human.

Which is bonkers to me personally considering how little I use it.

Exactly