Subscription: Better Than Owning?
More and more services are becoming subscriptions. If you check you bills you’ll see that you pay more of a percentage of your income on various subscriptions now than you did ten years ago. There’s the usual: phone, cell phone, cable, DSL or internet access. Then there’s various online subscription services: websites you belong to, a domain name purchase, ISP for a hosting service. Or perhaps a yard service.
Then some people lease their car, that’s a form of subscription as well. In the economic technical term all subscriptions are referred to as “rents” after all.
On a very prosaic level, if I pay money and buy something, I have ownership and within various social and legal limits I can do what please with this thing. If I subscribe to a service, I by much more limited rights. Not only time-limited but the range of what I can do is more limited. I typically don’t own that data that I subscribe to. Someone else does and their rights trump mine.
Kevin Kelly in “The Technium” post “Better Than Owning” talks about how everything is going to subscriptions. And, how all this will make our lives better. One only has to look at the RIAA suing its customers to see the problems there.
Kelly’s also being economically ignorant in not making the distinction between government produced commonly-held assets like roads, with privately produced and privately held assets like music and movies. I like his writing and his futurist pieces, but he’s off the mark here.
If I own data (i.e. bits. Once text or music or movies are bits then it’s all data.) then I need to find a way to store it and update as necessary. This is taken care of for me if I subscribe to it. However, subscription gives me time-limited access. If the owner decides to terminate business, my access purchase (really a subscription) is void. Yahoo Music demonstrated that recently and they won’t be the last.
Plus, there’s the need to keep paying for the thing too. The increasing subscription fees for TV, movies, and many other things etc. raise my monthly costs and require me to have a consistent income or sufficient financial reserves. Ownership does not require that, at least not in the same way. This is great if you’re a business owner charging subscription fees, but is increasing problem for a consumer.
While it’s easy enough to realize that I don’t need HBO, NetFlix, or whatever and simply to terminate that service. At some point various subscriptions, like my ISP or cell phone connections, would become essential enough that I would become a lesser member of society if I didn’t have that.