May 2021 could mark the end of the free web as we know it.
oogle is stopping its free Google Photos service, introducing a charge from June 1.
Reuters is ending its free online access, following the majority of news publishers into paywalls.
Facebook is trying (successfully, it seems) to get around EU privacy rules to make money from its free messaging service, WhatsApp.
Even Apple is contributing in a roundabout way, with its anti-tracking blitz on apps that are ‘free’.
All of this is happening to make such services more ‘sustainable’, say the providers. But the net result for most will be more pressure on your monthly subscription bill.
At the last count, my tally was heading toward €150. That’s not just basics such as Spotify and Netflix, but iCloud and Amazon Prime and LinkedIn Premium and a handful of news subscriptions and premium newsletters.
I’ve no real complaints: most of the services are relatively good value. (All music for a tenner? That’ll never seem expensive.)
Still, I had gotten used to them being free.
But ‘free’ doesn’t pay bills. Even for tech giants like Google.
So it is ending its gift to the internet: the totally free, unlimited storage Google Photos account. It stored all your photos (and, in most cases, videos) from all devices. Completely free. (With no ad-tracking.)
It seemed too good to be true. And it was.
When it last measured, there were four billion photos per day being uploaded. No matter how rich you are, or how many data centres you own, that costs money.
So from June 1, you’ll have to pay between €2 and €10 per month, depending on how much photo storage you need. (If you’re looking for alternatives to Google Photos, Amazon Photos is the only similar alternative, but it’s only free for Prime subscribers; I go into it in more detail in a guide I wrote on Independent.ie.)
Reuters’s new charge is a more professional play. You can read five articles free every month, after which you’ll have to pay $35 (€28) per month.
Facebook’s dilemma is trickier. It runs the world’s biggest free communications service: WhatsApp. With two billion users, sending pictures, videos and doing live calls, it costs a fortune to run (over and above the €16bn it paid to buy it).
In Ireland, 80pc of adults have it, three-quarters of whom use it every day. There’s barely a housing estate, GAA team or community association that now doesn’t have a WhatsApp group.
And what do we pay for it? Nothing. Facebook isn’t allowed, due mostly to EU privacy rules, to monetise it in the same way as Instagram or its main Facebook social platform.
So now it’s seeing if it can circle around that EU stricture by introducing a direct feature that creates a link between Facebook and WhatsApp — buttons.
A business on Facebook will be able to put a ‘WhatsApp button’ on its page. If you tap on that, the two of you start talking or trading or shopping.
The payoff for Facebook?
“Facebook may use the way you interact with these ads to personalise the ads you see on Facebook,” WhatsApp warns in the terms and conditions for the new privacy update.
In other words, Facebook is chipping away at new ways to monetise your existence as a WhatsApp user.
Because it believes that, like Google and Reuters, it’s time for it to start making money from the messaging service.
Why doesn’t Facebook charge for it? After all, if even 5pc of its user base paid, say, €1.99 a month for it, it’d see Facebook net something in the region of €2.4bn per year from it.
The reason is that it doesn’t want to risk users migrating to a rival service, as they certainly would in countries like India. Scale is prized above all in Facebook — it wants to have a way of being the biggest and making money from it, too.
(Twitter has a similar dilemma, as it makes relatively little from ads but doesn’t want to risk another platform taking its place as the world’s breaking news platform by putting a paywall in front of its users.)
Over time, it’s hard to see how Facebook won’t find a way to make money – by stealth or directly – from WhatsApp users.
But right now, Europe doesn’t like the way it’s going about it.
The Germans have erupted in anger, with that country’s lead Facebook regulator in Hamburg describing Facebook’s move as “illegal”. Facebook is proceeding anyway, saying that the Germans have misinterpreted what they’re doing.
The Irish DPC has reserved its position, saying that because it’s not a top-level data sharing switch between the ‘controllers’ of the two divisions of Facebook, it doesn’t clearly fall foul of the EU’s ban on data-sharing between the two services.
This is a little similar to what Facebook is arguing, that it’s a single, optional feature for WhatsApp users – not a data free-for-all between the two platforms.
But if WhatsApp starts introducing update after update with more single-feature data exchange functions like this one, it’ll start to look a lot more like Facebook is killing the data-sharing ban with a thousand cuts.