Almost everything we consume online is free. Email, search, news, entertainment. But those apps on our phones aren't really free - so if we're not paying, who is? The surveillance marketing industry. It doesn't have to be this way.

• Web pioneers tried to invent new payment methods.
• Google's founders were dead set against advertising.
• Email wasn't always open to data mining.

Yet here we are. Why?

Because business can exploit our desire that "Information wants to be free", and yet someone needs to pay. It started way back in the early days of the republic, evolved with newspapers, radio and broadcast TV, and persists today online.

Be the customer, not the product.

In Free Is Bad, digital marketing entrepreneur John Marshall explores the web industry's early history and its search for viable business models. It's an investigation of how an evolutionary accident in the design of the web resulted in the ad-tech industry, enabling "free" as the default model for technology products like search and email, and for media products like news and entertainment.

• How did we become the product?
• Why that has led to the fracturing of society
• How new, people-first businesses are improving matters

Free Is Bad offers not just a critique but optimism for a future where we control our online destiny. It also provides practical steps that will immediately improve your privacy and quality of information.

Ultimately, we're better off being the customer and not the product, because Free Is Bad. This book explains why that is, and what you can do about it.