In the past few weeks something we always knew to be true, but which we preferred to overlook for convenience’s sake, is proving harder to ignore. The fact is that digital services are not free, they never were and that any entity from Silicon Valley that ever claimed they could be did so only because it suited their agenda or that of someone else.

Think of all the free digital services you use every day without paying a penny: email, travel apps, social media, YouTube, search, Wikipedia. If you had to pay for all of them, how many would you use?

This revelation is not the result of a crash in the share prices of companies providing free internet services. Nor is it because a plethora of app companies has run out of financing options for their lossmaking operations. It has hit us because the “fake news” scandal has led us to question whether the news and information we have been consuming online for nothing was ever being generated in our interests.