7 Problems

Net neutrality under threat

Keep in mind that on a commercial Internet, the user is always a source of direct or indirect revenue for a service.

Because of their position as intermediaries, access providers can discriminate traffic between their subscribers and services. On top of charging subscribers a fee, and without a regulatory duty to treat all traffic equally (net neutrality), providers with large subscriber bases try to monetise access to those subscribers through a form of blackmail: “if you want my subscribers, you have to pay me.”

A service that does not pay the access provider will see the quality of its interconnection degrade, and all of that provider’s subscribers will then have a poor experience of the service — which pushes them toward competitors. Under those conditions, only the “big” services can cope. For them, the practice is even a windfall that strengthens their oligopoly.

It goes further: if the revenue a service earns from a user exceeds the price of that user’s Internet subscription, the service may be willing to pay the access provider that amount in order to gain one more user. What the user gets, though, is a subscription limited to that service’s offerings — not a subscription to the Internet itself. This is called “zero rating” and shows how such services see the Internet: merely a “pipe” to reach customers, a pipe they are even prepared to fund.

Freedom to leave is constrained

Users are tied to the services they use by the data they entrust to them and by the contacts they have there. They are held hostage: leaving a service means losing data and relationships. Widespread acceptance of this practice plays into the hands of the “big” players, who capitalise on network effects to pull more users into their “silo”.

In Europe, a directive requires services to let users recover all of their data. In practice this remains mostly a principle: the cost of migration is still very high, and users stay locked into the services they use.

User tracking

Users lose control over what is done with their personal data when they accept a service’s terms of use — a step they must take to access it. That is the visible part: the user is informed and can choose to forgo the service.

Other actors work in the shadows. They offer no service to users; they build and run “spies” and pay services to embed them in pages or apps. Their business is then to resell “profiles”. In Europe, a regulation requires services to tell users that their site uses “cookies”. Some cookies are needed for the service to work; those of these third parties are not.

Without regulatory constraints (for example in Europe the rules on personal data protection and privacy), the scope for abuse is vast.

Mass surveillance and censorship

Concentrating data makes mass surveillance far easier. It is not limited to totalitarian regimes (PRISM, NSA surveillance in the US, the French Intelligence Act, and so on). The ultimate safeguard for freedom of expression remains anonymity. It is essential for political opponents, whistleblowers, and journalists’ sources.

Concentration also makes censorship easier: it is enough to ask the service that hosts disputed data to make it unavailable. In democracies this used to require a court order; the trend is toward administrative requests, or even shifting responsibility onto services so that they police content themselves. If a service refuses, options remain to seize its domain name, block its IP address, or physically locate and disconnect the server.

On censorship, the US is probably best placed, since freedom of speech is written into its constitution. Almost everywhere else, there are many things one is not allowed to say. At the same time, the US is also among the leaders in mass surveillance.

Risk of data theft

Breaking a service’s defences grants access to the personal data of all its users. The cost/benefit ratio is attractive, which is why servers regularly face intrusion attempts of every kind. Successful breaches are common, and the consequences for the millions of users whose data is stolen can be severe (privacy violations, identity theft, fraudulent payments, and more).

Outages and denial of service

Large services can afford reliability through redundancy (at a higher energy cost) and dedicated teams to keep the service running. Smaller ones often depend on a few machines in a data centre. A power cut, a network failure, or a denial-of-service (DoS) attack can interrupt the service, sometimes with heavy losses.

Energy consumption

Over the years, the energy used by servers in data centres has come to represent a growing share of the world’s electricity. That consumption is an ecological concern that only grows as more servers are added.