Free can be fatal especially when it comes to news

Nothing is really free. Not even information or search results.

I GREW up with Chinese immigrant parents whose life ethos manifested the notion that you work hard for what you need, because nothing is free in this world.

In my adult life, I still tend to look a gift horse in the mouth and am suspicious of freebies and too generous offers. If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is just that.

But like many others, I’ve been seduced by the flood of freebies I get on the Internet. Information is free. Entertainment in the form of countless articles and videos is free. Search is free.

Google puts the wealth of centuries of research and knowledge literally at my fingertips, condensed into bite-sized, graphical and relevant information.

But as some have warned, and many of the rest of us are just discovering, nothing is really free. Not even information or search results.

When something is free, often someone, somewhere, is paying the price. And in a roundabout way, the price often comes back to us.

Let’s talk about search results. Who is paying the price of that free search?

We all are by handing over our browsing history and personal information. Google tracks each site you visit; it may also have your contacts and your credit card details. Each of us becomes a potential customer for an ad that Google sells to advertisers.

If a shampoo-seller wants to advertise a hair product for women who want more lustrous hair, Google might notice that I’d been searching “what to do with thinning hair” or “how to style my hair so it looks fuller” and serve me up as a customer for that shampoo-seller.

That shampoo ad might pop up the next time I open my browser to search for something unrelated, like “best omakase meal in Singapore under S$50”.

(That search would of course be noted and Google would be serving me restaurant ads next.)

Internet users are in effect handing over their information and preferences, and allowing sites such as Google and Facebook to monetise their Internet-browsing habits.

How about the information that goes into those search results?

Who are the ones spending money to produce videos, graphics and stories on, say, the Las Vegas shooting?

One big group of people involved in producing high-quality, credible information are journalists in newsrooms worldwide. Getting smart, energetic, ambitious people to devote their careers to gathering news and interpreting it is expensive. Media organisations know it and have traditionally expected people to pay for that information produced.

The Internet has broken that business model by serving up a lot of news and information for free.

The result has affected the financial bottom line of mainstream media organisations which now find their traditional revenue streams of subscriptions and printbased advertising hit. Predictably, some media companies have scaled down on journalism resources; just as predictably, over time, the information vacuum left behind has been filled by click-bait news sites while the proportion of in-depth, verifiable, credible information available in the digiverse has declined.

This explains why the issue of “fake news” or false information masquerading as news has become so prevalent in the last year. Bad information is driving out good.

Things have got to such a state that even Google and Facebook, which benefited from serving up free news for their users, are now coming to see that there is merit to helping media organisations stay viable to produce good news and information.

Otherwise, the quality of Google’s own search results will deteriorate, if they are populated by public relations spin from commercial companies and fake news content from websites created to channel traffic there for advertising revenue.

Google changed a key policy towards news publishers. It ended its decade-old “first click free” policy that makes news publishers give away stories for free each day, in exchange for high search rankings. Those that don’t want to give away their content free and who keep stories behind a paywall, as the Wall Street Journal did, would rank low in Google search results.

Google went one step further, saying it will help news publishers convert casual news readers into subscribers.

Facebook has also announced plans to help publishers gain paid subscriptions.

At the heart of the change in direction is a growing recognition that there is no such thing as free news or information. Free comes at a cost: to consumers, who surrender their private information and preferences, and pay in the currency of their attention; to media companies and journalists whose hard work is devalued when it is forced to be made free; and ultimately, to all of us who use the Internet, as the cybersphere becomes awash in untrustworthy information.

Meanwhile, the platform companies such as Google and Facebook, which have access to all the data analytics, will continue to monetise their information about us.

In the arc of things, the pendulum that says information wants to be free is slowly swinging back to a more median position where information has a price, and where we all decide collectively we are prepared to pay a reasonable price for it.

Hence, rampant digital piracy is already giving way to millions of paid subscriptions to streaming services. Already, many people are finding that its worth their while to pay to subscribe to a library of music or TV shows or movies they can watch anytime rather than to engage in illegal downloading of such content and risk falling afoul of the law, and risk their computers being infected with malware.

As a journalist, I am aware that my argument can be seen as self-serving, and indeed it is. But it is no less in the public interest. As an increasing number of commentators have argued, quality journalism is a public good that is for building stable democracies and as a watchdog on power.

Otherwise, without quality information, what might be the longterm effect of mindlessly imbibing low-grade content and digital ads doled out to us?

The information we are all getting for free today has a price tag – and we will pay one day – unless we take steps to remedy the situation today.