The internet loves you!

If you have a free email address from Google or Microsoft, please do not think of yourself as special -- you are not one in a million but one among millions across the globe who have these addresses. Ditto if you are on Facebook or LinkedIn. While you may be familiar with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet “How much do I love thee?”, you may not be aware of the six-line alternate version, ‘How much’ by the renowned American poet Carl Sandburg, which reads as follows:

How much do you love me, a million bushels?

Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.

And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel?

Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel.

And is this your heart arithmetic?

This is the way the wind measures the weather.

The most valuable piece of real estate in Bengaluru is not on M G Road or Church Street. It is the screen on your smartphone, laptop or desktop where you spend most of your time, at home, at your office, or on your commute to work. The companies whose ads appear on your screen have paid huge sums of money to Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon and Meta to keep you engaged and enticed. According to one estimate, your free Gmail account is worth almost $3,600 to the company. Based on the ads you have seen, you may not buy anything now, but eventually you will. And you will get addicted. Big Tech wins, you lose.

Think of all the free apps you have been downloading. It is doubtful that they will be free for ever. Streaming video channels (for example, Netflix) pique your interest by offering a few free films or episodes of crime dramas or soap operas to get you to become a paid subscriber. If Google, with its almost two billion user base, were to charge just $1 a year for its email service, it could generate a billion dollars even if only half of its subscribers are willing to pay.

Perhaps you consider yourself sophisticated and not too narcissistic to subscribe to Facebook. But, as a seasoned professional, you are quite proud to belong to LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) since you can advertise your educational credentials and career accomplishments, free of charge. Guess what, since 2015 LinkedIn has been making a lot of money selling your resume and other information you may have posted on your account to recruiters/headhunters willing to pay big bucks. Since Google is the search engine of choice for most internet users worldwide, the search results it generates in response to a query are ranked according to which advertisers want their products germane to the query listed first before all other results. Google got into the advertising business in 2008 by taking over DoubleClick, the world’s biggest internet advertising agency.

Big Tech’s foray into advertising has had enormous repercussions for the free press. Print media, long dependent on advertising to stay afloat, has seen its revenues drop sharply since businesses have switched to digital advertising to benefit from Big Tech’s global and instantaneous reach. This has resulted in hundreds of local and regional newspapers shutting down, especially in the US. Furthermore, several major newspapers have been bought by IT barons and their editorial stances have drastically changed to reflect their new owners’ political, social and economic perspectives. Diversity of opinion on issues of national importance has been replaced by group think -- a major contributor to why governments have been unable to control monopolisation of thought processes and the formation of ideological cartels across the globe.

The US government bailed out big banks and car companies when they were in financial trouble because they were considered too big to fail. The ordinary taxpayer was left holding the can. This is likely to be repeated with Big Tech as well. The question that has never been asked is how these companies got to be so big in the first place. In their insatiable appetite for growth, both Google and Meta swallowed up hundreds of competitors.

If democracy is slowly dying in darkness, it is only because truth is hidden in a sea of fake news and misinformation and, at least to you, free advertisements.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, either on the internet or here on earth.