The Wiki Man

Rory Sutherland

Wednesday, 22nd April 2009

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

Nobody fully realised the achievement of Sir Joseph Bazalgette until 70 years after his death. The size of the pipes he specified for London’s sewers was determined by calculating what diameter would handle the average daily flow and then doubling it to allow for natural fluctuation. Having arrived at the optimum diameter this way, Bazalgette arbitrarily redoubled the resulting figure, explaining ‘We’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen.’ The unforeseen turned out to be high-rise buildings. Without his decision, London’s sewage system would have failed 40 years ago.*

Something of the same foresight seems to have passed down to his descendant Peter Bazalgette. Writing in Prospect magazine last year (http://tinyurl.com/6bm53u), he is one of the few people to warn of the risks to the media if privacy campaigners hold too much sway.

It’s a controversial topic, but important, since hasty legislation could have dire consequences for the survival of newspapers. Already deprived of classified and recruitment advertising by the advent of digital alternatives, print media badly needs to make more money from their many online readers, who of course pay no cover price. Online advertising has little scarcity value, and so the only way you can charge advertisers a premium to appear on your website is by knowing a little about the individual people who are reading it.

Now your instinctive reaction to that is probably the same as anyone else’s — ‘I don’t want anyone to know anything about my online behaviour.’ And, if you’re happy to pay £10 each week for your Spectator and £3 for your Daily Telegraph, you have every right to maintain this purist stance. Most of us, though, need to consider a sensible compromise — a trade-off between our wish for anonymity and a newspaper’s need to make some money. There is a happy middle ground here, for instance, an arrangement which lets advertisers learn plenty about you without actually knowing who you are.

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