There is an uncomfortable paradox at the heart of the modern internet.
On the surface, we appear to live in an age of abundance: free email, free search, free social platforms, free content. Yet beneath this apparent generosity sits a vast and largely invisible economic system built on the continuous collection, analysis, and sale of personal data.
It is tempting to describe this as a failure — a system that has gone too far or lost its way. But it may be more accurate, and more troubling, to say the opposite. The system is not broken. It is functioning precisely as its incentives require it to.
The Invisible Engine
The architecture of the digital economy rests on a simple, known but frequently overlooked or misunderstood, foundation. Data is collected, aggregated, and refined because it can ultimately be monetised. That monetisation occurs, overwhelmingly, through advertising.
The connection is direct. The more precisely behaviour can be measured and predicted, the more valuable it becomes to those seeking to influence it. What begins as a record of activity becomes a means of shaping future choices.
In this sense, the industries built around data and those built around advertising are not separate domains. They are parts of the same system. One supplies the raw material; the other provides the commercial demand.
Beyond Privacy
Much of the debate has focused on privacy — how much is collected, how it is stored, how it is protected. These are important questions, but they address the symptoms rather than the cause.
The more fundamental issue is economic.
Advertising does not simply inform; it competes for attention and, increasingly, shapes perception. It can influence what is noticed, what is desired, and ultimately what is purchased. That influence is more effective when it is informed by data, and data becomes more valuable when it can support that influence. The result is a reinforcing cycle.
The costs of this system are not always obvious. They are dispersed and indirect:
- embedded within the price of goods
- reflected in patterns of consumption
- expressed through the continual extraction of personal information
These costs are real, even if they are rarely presented as such.
The Limits of Regulation
Over time, regulators have attempted to moderate these effects through mechanisms such as consent requirements and data protection rules. While these efforts have introduced some constraints, they have not altered the underlying dynamics.
Part of the difficulty lies in the global nature of the system. Data is collected and transmitted across borders, and firms operate at a scale that is not easily contained within national frameworks. Even where restrictions are effective locally, they are often circumvented elsewhere.
More fundamentally, these approaches do not address the incentive at the centre of the system. As long as detailed behavioural data remains commercially valuable, pressures to collect and use it will persist.
Reframing the Question
It may therefore be more productive to invert the usual approach.
Instead of asking how to control data, we might ask why it is being collected at such scale in the first place.
The answer leads back, consistently, to advertising.
This does not imply that all data use would vanish in its absence. Many fields — finance, healthcare, public administration — rely on data for legitimate and necessary purposes. But it does suggest that a significant proportion of current collection is driven by the demand created by consumer marketing.
From this perspective, a different kind of intervention becomes conceivable: not further refinement of data governance, but a reconsideration of the role of advertising itself.
Drawing a Boundary
Such a consideration need not imply the elimination of all commercial information.
A distinction can be made between information provided at source and promotion distributed through third-party environments.
Under this distinction, firms would remain free to describe and present their products within clearly identified environments they control. Consumers could choose to subscribe to updates or offers, provided that consent is explicit and transparent. Membership-based environments, where commercial content is knowingly accepted, could also remain.
What would change is the broader ecosystem of paid persuasion: the advertisements embedded within search results, the sponsored posts blending into social media, the promotional content that appears as independent commentary, and the unsolicited messages that reach consumers without invitation.
In removing these elements, the intention would not be to reduce information, but to change the conditions under which it is encountered.
The Question of Trade-offs
Such a shift would not be without consequence.
In the short term, industries heavily dependent on advertising — including major technology platforms and parts of the media sector — would face significant adjustment. The effects would extend beyond corporate balance sheets, reaching pension funds and savings vehicles that are indirectly linked to those valuations.
These are not trivial considerations, and they must be acknowledged openly.
Yet the longer-term effects point in a different direction. Advertising expenditure does not vanish without trace; it is currently embedded within the cost structures of goods and services. Its removal could, over time, lead to more direct competition on price and quality.
This presents a familiar, if uncomfortable, trade-off: short-term disruption in exchange for the possibility of greater long-term efficiency and clarity.
The End of Implicit Exchange
A more immediate consequence would be the transformation of how services are funded.
Many digital platforms rely on advertising revenues to support what appears to be free access. Without that revenue, these services would need to establish more explicit pricing models. Email, cloud storage, social platforms, and media content would all need to reveal their underlying costs.
At first glance, this introduces friction. Users who have become accustomed to free access would face direct charges. But it would also introduce transparency. The current system operates through implicit exchange — data and attention traded for access. A shift to explicit pricing would make those exchanges visible, allowing individuals to decide more consciously what they value and what they are willing to pay for.
A Structural Shift
This change would reverberate beyond individual consumption.
If certain digital services — particularly those related to communication and identity — are widely regarded as essential, their exposure to direct pricing raises broader questions. It may prompt a reconsideration of whether some elements should be treated less as market goods and more as basic infrastructure.
Such questions are not new in other sectors, but they have not yet been fully confronted in the digital domain, at least by the Anglosphere. There are various services provided by Baltic and Nordic States that begin to address this issue.
Whilst Do Less: Be Better is generally opposed to expanding State-provision of services, we acknowledge that it is both efficient and necessary in some circumstances. This is one of those circumstances. As States require citizens to interact electronically, so the onus falls on the State to provide secure, low-cost or tax-funded e-communication and storage capability to those citizens.
We will develop these ideas in a future article.
Choosing Transparency
Critics of such an approach will argue, not without reason, that advertising plays a useful role. It can reduce search costs, support competition, and fund access to information and services.
But these benefits must be weighed against the structure that produces them. A system that reduces visible price while increasing hidden cost is not neutral. It redistributes cost in ways that are less obvious, and therefore less frequently examined. The choice is not between cost and no cost. It is between different forms of cost.
One system conceals them, embedding them within prices and behaviours: The other makes them explicit, requiring conscious decisions.
A Different Kind of Intervention
Modern policy often assumes that problems of complexity require greater complexity in response. Yet some systems are best understood – and perhaps best adjusted – by focusing on their central incentive.
In this case, the incentive is clear: Remove the economic driver, and the surrounding structures begin to change. This is not a proposal for perfection. It is a proposal for re-balancing away from a model that depends on continual extraction and influence, and towards one that rests more directly on transparent exchange.
A Final Reflection
The digital economy has evolved to treat human attention and behaviour as its primary raw material. The solution to this problem is not simply how to regulate that process. It is to accept that this is a process we do not wish to sustain at all.
Therefore, the most effective way forward is not to refine the current system but to carefully, but directly, remove it; to Do Less: Be Better.