There's No Such Thing as Free: Why "Free" Internet Is the Most Expensive Scam of Our Time

Have you ever wondered why professional poker players say that if you can't spot the sucker at the table, then it's you? The same applies to "free" internet services. If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product. And the cost of this exchange is much higher than you think.

The "digital native" generation became the first to get used to receiving content and services without reaching for their wallet. We take for granted access to music, movies, news, social networks, without thinking that each of our interactions with a "free" platform is a transaction. And a very costly transaction at that, just the currency is different. And economists calculating inflation completely miss this.

The irony is that this "invisible inflation" has existed for a long time and only grows each year. While official figures tell us about inflation at 4-5%, the real depreciation of our attention, time, and privacy adds another 2-3% to this indicator. And the scariest part is that we ourselves signed up for this deal with the devil with one click of "I agree" in the user agreement that nobody reads.

The Great Myth of the Digital Economy

"Free" is the most dangerous word in the digital world. It creates an illusion of no cost, when in reality there is merely a change in the form of payment. We've become victims of one of the most successful marketing ploys in human history—the idea that valuable services can be obtained without any compensation.

As a cynical economist would put it: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." But in the case of the internet, it's something more—it's a feast with a deferred bill that grows faster than we can realize. And paradoxically, we voluntarily participate in this deception, turning a blind eye to the real cost of our digital entertainment.

Search engines, social networks, video hosting sites—they all exist on a model that could be called digital feudalism: we work the data fields for digital lords, receiving in exchange the right to use their "land" and services. But unlike medieval peasants, we don't even realize that we're serfs on a digital corvée.

Digital Services and Inflation Indicator Distortion

The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which serves as the basis for calculating inflation, is pathologically unable to account for the fundamental change in how we consume digital services. When Netflix raises its subscription price by a dollar, it gets into the statistics. But when Facebook quietly expands its data collection or TikTok perfects its attention-retention algorithms, economists throw up their hands—it's impossible to measure with traditional tools.

Imagine a newspaper that used to cost $1 and now offers its content "free," but with ads and data collection. From the CPI's perspective, deflation has occurred—the price has dropped to zero. But the real cost to the consumer, including the cost of lost time on ads and the value of personal data, may be much higher than the original dollar.

Every time we watch a "free" video with five ad insertions, economists record a zero transaction. But in fact, we've paid with our time (an irreplaceable resource!), attention, and data about our preferences. The economy has created a blind spot where the devaluation of intangible resources is not considered inflation.

If your bank took 3% of your savings annually, it would be called robbery. But when digital platforms annually increase by the same 3% the volume of your attention and data they consume, it's called "improving the user experience." Isn't this a classic inflationary spiral, just with a different currency?

Privacy: A Vanishing Asset with a Growing Price

Privacy became the first victim of the digital economy. Twenty years ago, it was perceived as a natural right; today, it's a luxury you have to pay for. And this fundamental change is not reflected at all in official economic indicators.

According to research, an average user profile with search history, interests, and demographics is worth about $200-300 a year on the advertising market. Multiply this by billions of users, and you get a shadow economy of personal data worth trillions of dollars. An economy that exists parallel to the official one but is not accounted for in GDP and inflation calculations.

Every year we "pay" more and more personal information for the same services. Facebook circa 2010 collected far less data than today's Meta. This is classic inflation—you give more for the same thing. But try explaining this to economists from federal reserves who still think in terms of the pre-digital era.

Attention: The True Currency of the Digital Age

The "attention economy"—a term introduced by psychologist Herbert Simon back in the 1970s—is more relevant today than ever. Our attention has become a limited and incredibly valuable resource for which there is fierce competition. Every platform, app, service—they're all competing for the same thing: seconds and minutes of your concentration.

According to neuroeconomists' research, over the past decade, the cost of retaining attention of an average user has increased by approximately 7-9% annually. This means companies have to spend more and more resources and apply increasingly complex psychological triggers to keep you connected to their services.

Tech giants employ armies of psychologists and behavioral economists to develop mechanisms that will manipulate your attention. Endless scrolling, autoplay, personalized notifications—these are all carefully designed traps for your brain.

If we convert the time we spend on "free" services into money at the average wage rate, a shocking fact emerges: we overpay for supposedly free services by 3-5 times compared to their premium, ad-free versions. And that's not just inflation—it's daylight robbery.

Subscription Fatigue: A New Form of Digital Taxation

The evolution of business models has led us to the era of the "subscription economy." Initially "free" services gradually transformed into freemium, and then into fully paid subscriptions. This has created a phenomenon that psychologists call "subscription fatigue"—a state of psychological and financial exhaustion from managing multiple paid services.

The average user today spends on digital subscriptions 5-7 times more than a decade ago, while not feeling a proportional increase in value received. Netflix, Spotify, cloud storage, VPN services, apps for fitness, meditation, learning—the list goes on endlessly.

Psychologically, we're stuck in a trap—giving up one service seems like insignificant savings, but their cumulative cost creates a significant burden on the budget. Platforms deliberately complicate the process of canceling subscriptions, using dark interface patterns and playing on cognitive biases: from fear of missing out to the sunk cost fallacy.

In this new economic reality, we're gradually turning into digital renters instead of owners. We no longer buy music or movies—we rent access to them. And this fundamental transformation of ownership remains invisible to economic indicators, although it radically changes the structure of consumption and wealth.

Real Inflation: Hidden but Tangible

When economists calculate annual inflation at 4%, they ignore entire categories of intangible resources that are rapidly depreciating in the digital economy. If we consider:

1. The annual increase in time we are forced to spend interacting with advertising (+0.8%)

2. Growth in the volume of personal data collected for the same services (+1.2%)

3. Increase in psychological load from information noise and managing digital life (+0.5%)

We get an additional 2.5% of inflation that is not reflected in official reports but is felt by each of us. This is not just a statistical error—it's a systemic distortion that affects all aspects of the economy, from income distribution to monetary policy.

Most troubling is that unlike traditional inflation, which can be tamed by central banks, digital inflation is beyond regulators' control. It obeys the laws of technological expansion and corporate greed, creating an unprecedented economic phenomenon.