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INFORMATION wants to be free. This decades-old slogan is the philosophical heart of the internet, putting nearly all human knowledge at our fingertips, free to anyone with a connection.

Here is another old slogan: if you鈥檙e not paying, you鈥檙e the product. We might not hand over cash for many of the services we get from the internet giants, but we do pay in cold, hard data. On the whole, we have been happy to make that pact. But as the row over Facebook data gathered by Cambridge Analytica shows, many are starting to realise the true price of 鈥渇ree鈥�. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate how much we value our own data 鈥� and make tough choices about what we will pay to wrest back control

It wasn鈥檛 meant to be this way. The free internet championed by those who determined the first online norms had little to do with monetary cost. 鈥淔ree as in free speech, not as in free beer,鈥� was their slogan.

But we were soon led to expect free beer, too. The huge growth of companies like Facebook was supercharged by venture capitalists, happy to fund loss-making start-ups in the hopes of hitting it big. To grow, companies needed scale. To achieve scale, they had to be free.

As access to the internet widened, new users inherited this culture. Yes, the online world provided a playground for ideas, but nobody wanted to pay for anything there. People didn鈥檛 want the cost of setting up their own email provider when they could use an ad-supported one for free, for example.

鈥淎ll the marketing associated with the internet has been designed to lead people to value convenience overwhelmingly, and to devalue anything else such as your own freedom and other people鈥檚 freedom,鈥� says Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and a long-standing critic of Facebook.

鈥淭he online world provided a playground for ideas, but nobody wanted to pay for anything there鈥�

This is how we have ended up relying so heavily on the 鈥渇ree鈥� data-slurping tech giants. But some people are trying to change the dynamic.

Aral Balkan is an activist and co-founder of Indie, which develops privacy-minded tools and services. He is working with the Belgian city of Ghent to provide an alternative to social media sites.

Citizens will be able to sign up for their own .gent website, which will be able to follow and update other .gent sites. The sites will also connect to other like-minded services such as Mastodon, a privacy-respecting alternative to Twitter (see 鈥�Ditch聽and switch鈥�). The idea is that it will work much like a Facebook profile, but each person will own their own site 鈥� there is no central authority hoovering up your data.

On the face of it, that sounds a lot like the old web, where people created simple pages hosted on computers they controlled. The crucial difference is that it used to be difficult to put things online without technical know-how 鈥� which is partly why easy-to-use services like Facebook are popular.

Balkan wants the .gent project to be simple to use, with plans for the webhosting and domain registration to happen in the background. 鈥淲e solve that problem, and that鈥檚 where we change the game,鈥� he says.

The project is being funded by the city of Ghent, which Balkan says is a model for the way forward. 鈥淲e need to start funding these ethical alternatives from the commons, for the common good,鈥� he says.

He鈥檚 not calling for social media to be run by the government or for Facebook to be nationalised, he says 鈥� the potential for surveillance is too high. The Chinese government plans to use personal data to rate individual citizens, for example. Instead, the taxpayer could fund online services, which are kept at arm鈥檚 length from the state.

Take the power back

鈥淭he government can provide the underlying infrastructure, but the control of the data should be with citizens themselves,鈥� says Francesca Bria, founder of the DECODE project in Barcelona and Amsterdam.

This European Union-funded initiative is combining a blockchain, the distributed ledger technology behind bitcoin, with an extra layer of encryption to let citizens in each city share their data for the common good. The idea is that companies or governments could build services that use this data to improve citizen鈥檚 lives, and the citizens get to choose which projects they take part in.

These projects are small in scale and unlikely to take down Silicon Valley any time soon, but the EU is already mulling stronger responses. In the same week as the Cambridge Analytica revelations emerged, the European Commission announced plans for a digital tax aimed squarely at the data-hawking giants. 鈥淧rofits made through lucrative activities, such as selling user-generated data and content, are not captured by today鈥檚 tax rules,鈥� it said in a statement.

Bria says that the revenue from this digital tax should be invested in creating alternatives that protect users鈥� privacy.

The tax may not happen; countries like Ireland and Luxembourg, which attract the European headquarters of US tech firms by offering low-tax regimes, aren鈥檛 happy about the proposal and may still block it.

But the EU has an even stronger weapon to deploy. An EU-wide law called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force in May 鈥� including in the UK, regardless of Brexit 鈥� and stipulates that companies must give people much greater control over their data or face heavy fines.

It is an interesting coincidence that the GDPR is coming in just as everyone is focused on Facebook, says Paul Bernal at the University of East Anglia, UK, as the law requires companies to seek a higher standard of consent from people before exploiting their data. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a big opportunity to see whether the regulators are going to use it,鈥� he says.

It could lead to companies having to explicitly ask people to opt-in to data use. This is a conversation that is long overdue. When our data was increasingly monetised in the early 2000s, we all just went along with it, says Rachel Coldicutt, CEO of UK internet think tank Doteveryone. 鈥淭here was never an explicit moment of consent.鈥�

Anger against Facebook has generated its own hashtag 鈥� #DeleteFacebook 鈥� and some believe that the outrage is unlikely to subside. 鈥淚n the past, it has always blown over, but I do feel that it is different this time,鈥� says Balkan.

鈥淲hen our data was increasingly monetised in the early 2000s, we all just went along with it鈥�

If Mark Zuckerberg wants to make a radical apology and regain trust, he should turn Facebook ads off for a year, says Coldicutt. 鈥淭hey could say they are going to spend a year looking at alternative business models,鈥� she says. 鈥淭he fact that they are not means the responsibility is coming back to us as individuals.鈥�

鈥淚t is important that we are finally realising that this is a structural problem,鈥� agrees Balkan. 鈥淭he business model is unethical, and we need alternatives.鈥�

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淪top being the product鈥�