The biggest unintended consequence I see is that more tech businesses will have to charge for their service rather than make money in opaque ways.
The big tech companies are edging towards complete monopolies in their spaces and a significant part of this is that they know everything and they're allowed to leverage that data. Why would you go to anybody else to advertise? Unbundling this, making advertising harder again will spread out the budget, probably push more towards publishers rather than networks. Again, not a bad thing.
It also means that new players get to compete. It's been very tough to compete with similar services on price when the incumbents can operate at zero "cost".
Not having your data traded under the table is just gravy.
I'm comfortable saying that paid networks won't in-and-of-themselves improve conversation.
In other words, while I'm not sure if this will improve discourse, at least it mitigates a little bit of the questionable social media meddling that we've seen of late.
I kind of see jimmaswell's point that there is a risk of creating a "tiered Internet". But I'm not sure it's completely an either/or situation. It sounds like that the bill also emphasizes more transparency on what is being done with the data and who it is sold to. As long as personal data is not shared haphazardly and in a leaky fashion, consumers might be just fine with the bargain they get.
Things like shopper loyalty programs already offer this sort of bargain: in exchange for allowing companies access to more granular shopper information, the shopper gets access to greater discounts. Loyalty programs currently are subject to various consumer protection rules. In contrast, the bargain social media has struck with users (free service in exchange for marketing data) is not well protected.
Personally, I'm fine with a little more transparency and disclosure in this fashion. I don't think this necessarily means the end of free social media per se. (I will say though that this is a sign, one of many, that the days of social media "moving fast and breaking things" is over.)
Also, today, privacy conscious users are cut off from the main forums of discourse. Is that better?
EDIT: since people are downvoting this, I should clarify that I’m not advocating against the policy, it just doesn’t seem intuitive to me that this policy would reduce monopolization (data privacy may well be worth the tradeoff). If I’m wrong I’d love to be corrected!
1) It encourages companies to be silent or remain ignorant.
2) I didn't see anything mentioned about the cyber-sec aspect, but I would imagine this will put a bounty on the heads of the largest companies.
Perhaps I watch too many (bad?) movies but shorting a stock on the cusp of being hacked could be lucrative.
Under GDPR, if your data processing is based on user consent, then that consent must be given freely. That means you should provide equivalent service, regardless of consent being given. Providing one service for free and another for a fee is not equivalent, so I'd argue that such consent would be invalid, as it was not freely given.
However, consent is only one of several conditions for processing data. Another would be "legitimate interests" of the business. If you choose to process data based on it, then you do not need consent at all. In such case you can provide separate services: free with data sharing, and paid without data sharing.
The trick here is that you actually need to be able to prove that "legitimate interests" of your business require collection and processing of that data. And additionally such interests are overridden by "fundamental rights and freedoms" of users. Which is probably why most businesses went the consent route, as it appears to be more clear-cut.
Twitter wouldn’t need to pretend that it didn’t know that a substantial part of its user base is fraud-bots if it just charged some nominal fees for something other than advertising.
It is an interesting thought experiment, though, to consider what facebook would look like if its revenue was derived from convincing users that it was worth a monthly subscription.
I topped up my FB balance with like $2 or $5 dollars, in ?2006?. When Facebook (quickly) discontinued that silliness, my account silently disappeared. MARK ZUCKERBERG, YOU OWE ME MONEY!
I compare that with Twitter at the time had two thousand employees. It makes no sense to me.
Which is bonkers to me personally considering how little I use it.