blog/content/posts/la-gratuite-en.md

Title: Free, but at what cost ? Category: Société Tags: internet, société Summary: Free, but at what cost ? Slug: la-gratuite Lang: en

Internet is a strange world, where almost all of us have taken strange habits. One of them in particular has raised into a principle that few will question : free of charge access to anything. Being able to access any resource we want without paying a single cent has become so natural that one almost forgets what implications it has.

I will not spend much time beating a dead horse with another variation of the argument that is usually spit out regarding this topic : "If you're not paying, you are the product". While it's extremely important to wonder why Google "offers" us a mailbox that other service providers make us pay at least 1€/month, or why Google or Facebook let us store gigabytes of pictures or videos free of charge, my focus will not be on free (as in free beer) services. Anyone is free (as in free speech) to consciously save a few euros per month at the expense of their privacy or their freedom, after all.

I would rather address the widespread expectation of free access to content, which is obviously related to the previous topic, for there would be no reason to use those free service if they did not provide free content. But it raises a different concern, which is that of the retribution of the content producer. A cumulative profit of 30 billion dollars in 2016 is some rather strong evidence that Google and Facebook live perfectly well in spite of not requiring a single cent from us ; but it is much harder to explain how one could require having content that is both of quality AND free of charge.

For that demand seems rather inconsistent once transposed in "real life" : does one expect high quality articles in free newspapers ? Does one expect a free TV channel to produce content whose primary goal would be quality instead of popularity ? Would one prefer to watch - free of charge - a movie cut by several ad breaks than to rent it or watch it in a cinema ? Wasn't one used to pay for access to encyclopedic knowledge ? Did one expect a complete stranger to offer us some of his own time to spread his knowledge, without any counterpart (be it money or a plain old human exchange) ?

Yet this demand can be rather well explained, even when considering things beyond the trivial observation that there is - apparently - nothing to lose when you acquire a good free of charge. For a long time, access to content was made by getting a copy of it (a copy of such book, a VHS tape, a vinyl record, a feature article published in such newspapers), but Internet has shattered that model of diffusion ... for it allows infinite multiplication of copies of content.

Elle s'explique pourtant assez bien, cette exigence, au delà bien entendu de la constatation triviale qu'on a - apparemment - rien à perdre avec un bien acquis gratuitement. Si, pendant bien longtemps, l'accès aux contenus s'est fait en s'en procurant une copie (un exemplaire de tel livre, une cassette VHS, un disque vynile, un article de presse publié dans tel journal), l'émergence d'Internet a fait voler ce modèle en éclats ... en ce qu'il permet la multiplication à l'infini des copies d'un contenu. Il apparaît dès lors vain de prétendre en restreindre l'accès, et ce sont d'autres valeurs qui peuvent dès lors être monnayées : par exemple, l'accessibilité (le fait de pouvoir accéder au contenu de n'importe où sans se soucier de son stockage, à l'exemple de Dropbox, Google Drive, Netflix, ...), ou simplement la capacité à sélectionner le contenu de qualité parmi l'infini flux de contenu disponible et toujours renouvellé.