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What If The Web Had Been Subscription-Based Instead Of Today's Ad-Supported Surveillance State?

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We accept the Web of today as if its current form was the only possible way the Internet could have been created. The vast surveillance state that stalks us across the digital world, harvesting our every interest, hoovering up our every post, hoarding our every behavior and hawking it all to the highest bidder is just the inevitable outcome of the construction of an online world in this worldview. Yet today’s commercialized Web did not necessarily have to come in the form of ad-supported “free” services that we pay for by bartering away our personal data. What might the Web have looked like if its early creators had mirrored the offline world’s subscription model?

The Web’s departure from the technological world in which it was born is striking. In its early days, the world outside the Web was one where information and services cost money. Accessing news required a subscription fee, information search engines were commercial products affordable only to institutions and publication at global scale required vast resources.

The digital world upended these norms, envisioning a world where all information and services would be free and we could all be publishers. As this Utopian dreamland collided with the realities of the real world, the commercial Web was born, creating the idea of using data-driven advertisements targeted with ever-finer resolution to generate revenue in order to maintain free access to those sites and services.

In turn, the idea of ordinary people bartering away their privacy, willingly allowing their most intimate secrets to be harvested, repackaged, reused and resold became simply the way things were done on the Web.

Today we no longer even blink at the idea of a company harvesting our data.

We simply accept that it is just the way the Web works.

What if the Web had instead followed the course of the technological world at the time it was created?

News sites would have required a subscriber number and password to access. Search engines would be available only through institutional subscriptions or local municipal library access. Social media platforms would charge for access and potentially charge a per-post fee on top of that, with an extra charge for multimedia content.

Much like individual television stations ultimately came to be bundled together into packages, perhaps the Web would have evolved into content packages, in which access to groups of related sites would have been sold through subscriptions. Major blog platforms might have sold “basic” access packages granting access to the majority of their low-traffic sites, while their highest-traffic name brand sites might have required individual subscriptions.

Such a world is almost unthinkable today. Yet the sad reality is that it is in actuality our modern reality, but where bartering of personal information has replaced writing a monetary check.

Web companies argue that by providing “free” ad-supported sites they are able to provide access to society’s poorest citizens who could not otherwise afford access.

Yet if companies really wished to support those communities, they could do a lot more for them by paying them for their data. A portion of that payment would be deducted as the “entrance fee” to their platform, but the rest of the revenue would go directly into the pockets of users. The more revenue a user generates for a platform through their activities and interests, the more they themselves earn.

Such a model would make today’s current bartering process transparent and visible, while at the same time doing far more for the low income users Web companies claim they wish to help.

Putting this all together, we accept today’s ad-supported digital surveillance state as merely the “natural” form the Web had no choice but to take, without recognizing that the Web could have been so very different.

In the end, while we may complain about bartering away our secrets today in exchange for watching funny cat videos, the fact of the matter is that the Web never had to be this way.