Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The hidden cost of free technology

[iStock] 
issue 08 May 2021

Back in late 2019 I met someone from Zoom who was visiting London. The company, then as now, offered free video-conferencing calls for up to 40 minutes, but charged a fee of around £10 a month to users who wanted longer calls.

Towards the end of the conversation, I flippantly asked what I thought was a hypothetical question: ‘How much would you charge to give full Zoom access to the whole UK population?’ I didn’t think much more about it, but to my surprise they came back to me a few days later: ‘If you know anyone in the government who’d...

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