The past few weeks have seen some developments that may change the way companies like mine can reach online users. The changes may also have a negative impact on the free nature of the internet and, ultimately, on orights to freedom in general.
The first change was Google entering the Chinese market. You'd have had to be on a different planet not to have noticed the news that the company once famed for it's "do no evil" motto was allying itself with a country that employs tens of thousands of civil servants to censor the internet.
The Google China project has demonstrated to leaders of oppressive regimes across the globe how they can strictly enforce the content available to their citizens online, although the UN hardly set a great example last year when it staged its World Internet Summet in Tunisia, a country that has closely restricted internet access. I can't imagine that it will be long before we see Google Iran or Google Syria springing up with all references to human rights abuses wiped out of the collective memory of their search engines.
Google's other move to create a private internet may provide an even greater challenge to the human rights community and specifically to businesses that rely on internet traffic to survive.
The search giant is in the process of buying up dark fibre, unused internet cabling and connections across the globe, in an effort to create a rival to the internet that the company would control.
Google denies that it has any plans to do so.
Should Google proceed and launch a rival internet service then business could become tough for online publishers like me. Assuming that consumers sign up to a free internet connection from Google, their systems would be tied in to their version of the internet, one that they control, both in terms of what gets in and what is kept out.
A mass of users tied in to a free internet system creates a potentially extremely valuable revenue stream for companies such as Google.
Say, for example, a Google internet user wished to visit my website. At present, we incur costs when a user logs on, primarily in terms of the bandwidth they consume, something we must pay for, but the costs are greatly offset by the value of the advertising we show to them. However on a Google-owned internet, there is a possibility that users would be charged a fixed fee to access my website.
We're not the largest site in the world and so an internet service could be complete without us. In addition, we're specialised so most users would have no need to read our constantly updated news. Feasibly, our users may be willing to pay a couple of pence to access our site. But that revenue would go to Google. There is no way of knowing how many potential visitors the "entry fee" would deter, and how that would affect our advertising revenue and, therefore, our entire business.
Alternatively, Google might get website owners to pay a fixed fee per Google user who accesses our content (a variant on the company's existing pay-per-click ad system). But this would change the relationship between website owners and customers, although it is not unique. Some mobile phone networks operate the same policy for access to their customer base.
However, Google's advertising product, AdWords, has long been criticised for allowing a company's competitors to click on their adverts, thereby driving up the costs to advertisers without providing the advertiser with any valid leads. A colleague once told me of an advertiser who noticed that his AdWords clicks had gone down during a particular weekend. He later realised that the reason for this was that he and all his competitors were at a major trade show, meaning they didn't have time to repeatedly click on his adverts.
Imagine how many times your competitors would view your website if they knew that each page viewed was being charged to their rival by Google.
The other development was the announcement by AOL and Yahoo! that they are to start charging for the bulk delivery of e-mail.
This is actually a good idea. We're all deluged by spam, and it can be incredibly annoying when an important message inadvertently finds itself nestled between spam messages offering low loan rates, an immediate PhD or a penis extension.
Companies like mine who rely on sending out newsletters to our customer base lose a considerable level of business to the spam folder. For the majority of our mailshots, we use third parties to "broadcast" our e-mails for us and they charge for their expertise at getting around filtering systems.
The proposed paid-for services for AOL and Yahoo! could actually work out cheaper than hiring these agencies.
The knowledge that each e-mail costs a certain amount of money to send will also incentivise newsletter mailers to ensure that the content they send out is actually relevant to their customers. It will enable the bulk e-mail baddies to realise that simply sending out an e-mail to as many people as possible is no longer an acceptable business practice.
In order to ensure a maximum return on the investment of sending the e-mail, marketers will need to learn more about their customers and truly take advantage of the unique aspects of e-mail - targeting a message to an individual rather than bunching everyone into a homogeneous mailout.
Benjamin Cohen made his first million from internet commerce by the time he was 17. Now, he is the publisher of pinknews.co.uk
