TROM Voices: Evgeny Morozov & Birgitta Jonsdottir - "Internet Data, the new Gold"

Today digital data has become the new gold and companies are mining for it. See more such videos at tromsite.com. Please help us produce more videos by supporting us here https://www.tromsite.com/donate/

TROM Voices

Internet Data,
The New Gold

It's data an asset? Can it
be privately owned?

Is it okay for a company like Google

to collect my data while
I'm using the service,

then claim it as their own,

and then basically derive all sorts of benefits,
including financial benefits, from that data.

You know, when I used to
use the post office,

I would have never thought that
the post office would ever claim

ownership over the
contents of my letters.

You have to understand what drive
those companies. Those companies

are not really interested
in immediate payoffs.

They're only interested in
convincing their investors

that they will keep on
growing indefinitely.

So as the user growth slows down in
North America and Western Europe

they have to convince the investors
and financial markets

that they have the capacity to capture the markets in India, China

Russia or Latin America and so forth.

And the easiest way to convince the investors
is by basically striking this deal

with telecom operators (in the case of Facebook
and the same also in the case of Google)

to bring in more and more people on board, in the hopes of convincing the investors

that once is people on board they also become
users of Facebook, Google and so forth.

Facebook they consider themselves to be
the biggest community in the world.

The biggest democracy because there are more
people on Facebook than in China or India.

So what Facebook
did recently was... They

offered something that was always
called "free-basics" in India.

Free basic means that they want to give free
Internet to the poorest people in the India

at a cost.
And the cost is

that you have only access to what Facebook
wants you to have access to.

It's the complete opposite to net neutrality.

And there was a massive
sort of protest against this

and so what Facebook did to try to

push it even further was
that they sent a message

to all the Facebook users in India to urge
them to sign a petition for free basics.

They were testing how far they could get away with it.
And they didn't start with a small country, but

the largest populated country in the world.

And, you know, if there had not been

some resistance towards this
and awareness building

then they would have
gotten away with it.

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