Would you give up Google for $17,000 a year? The Fed wants to know
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I assume Github and some of the others have mechanisms to migrate to a 'local' account, but I'm fairly sure some of the others would involve basically starting from scratch.
That said, for $17,000, of course I would, it would pay for the inconvenience many times over.
EDIT: ignore; went back and re-read it and sounds like the user would be paid.
Unless I'm reading TFA wrong, they're not paying you, you're paying them. I took it to mean that they are trying to place a value on personal data required for such "free" internet services as Google.
But lets explore the possibility of unaccounted economic value for a second. Today there are roughly about 3 billion people using search engines with total ad revenue roughly around $150Bn, meaning value per user is ~$50/year.
In order for unaccounted economic surplus to exist, all of these users would need to be ready to pay more than $50/year (and that there are no ads). Another scenario is 90% of population keeps it as it is and 10% (300M people) get no ads and pay more than $50/year. With adblockers around and no other value proposition I can think of right now, this sounds unlikely.
There is a big difference between being offered $17k to entirely quit search engines and being ready to pay $17k a year to use them.
> $17k to entirely quit search engines and being ready to pay $17k a year to use them.
No, economically speaking these are equivalent constructs. Of the value of a service is X, then I would be willing to pay X for access to the service, and similarly be willing to be paid X to lose access to the service.
If people are willing to pay for a search engine, just because they aren't, doesn't mean they wouldn't be willing to. It just means that there's deadweight loss somewhere, or in this case that Google isn't operating at maximum short term profitability.
"Economically speaking" ignores that we are human beings with biases. There is significant experimental evidence our brains don't perceive them as equal. Google "Prospect Theory" for more.
I am willing to get paid $10k to get rid of cancer, and in no scenario I would be willing to pay $10k to get one. It is clearly an asymmetric construct economically.
People are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer treatment, so 10k clearly isn't the marginal value.
Youtube... 90% of my viewing consists of history, documentaries, programming tutorials and maker/engineer channels. Adequate replacement of that, that's a toughy. But what's funny, Youtube is demonetizing a lot of that. So, I'm hoping for a new platform to pop-up soon.
But man, "Twitter, however, was valued at zero euros." Burn.
This needs to go well beyond a few internet services. GDP is a poor measure that was never intended for what it is used for today.
I wonder how that would affect the Internet, and society.
People would have to learn how to find information out for themselves. Yes, some people will find wrong info, but I'd argue there's still a lot of wrong info floating around today.
Hopefully such skills would carry over to the physical world as well.