Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Your Internet Bill is About To Get Higher - But It's Not What You Think

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

On today's weekly roundup of the biggest headlines on Wall Street, Nicole unpacks the biggest stories that hint at the future of an ultra-monetized internet where we pay for social media and our favorite content.

Money rehabbers, you get it. When you're trying to have it all, you end up doing a lot of juggling. You have to balance your work, your friends, and everything in between. So when it comes to your finances, the last thing you need is more juggling. That's where Bank of America steps in. With Bank of America, you can manage your banking, borrowing, and even investing all in one place. Their digital tools bring everything together under one roof, giving you a clear view of your finances whenever you need it. Plus, with Bank of America's wealth of expert guidance available at any time, you can feel confident that your

money is working as hard as you do. So why overcomplicate your money? Keep it simple with Bank of America, your one-stop shop for everything you need today and the goals you're working toward tomorrow. To get started, visit bofa.com slash newprosmedia. That's b-o-f-a dot com slash n-e-w pros p-r-o-s media. bfa.com slash newprosmedia. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. it's time for some money rehab. Here's your weekly roundup of some of the biggest headlines on Wall Street and how they affect your finances. To start, I would love nothing more than to update you on the status of the Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg cage match at the Coliseum, but unfortunately, I am currently locked out of Twitter for reading too many tweets. Yeah. If you missed this one, now Twitter users can only read 600 tweets a day. But

if you want to read 6,000 tweets a day, you're going to have to pay for a verified account, which I will not be doing as of now. So in the absence of being able to verify anything for 24 hours, let's just imagine that Musk has offered to wrestle Zuck with one arm tied behind his back because it could be true. I have no way of knowing. The real fight on the internet, though, isn't between two internet titans. It's over the ownership of and access to content. And that's what's shaking up the financial world right now. The big question of monetizing the internet. As the landscape shifts, big players in the space are desperately trying to find their footing. This struggle is playing out on multiple

fronts. Reddit and Twitter are struggling with Google and other companies over how they profit from content created by users. In Canada, though, a new law would force companies to pay for news stories they link to. We're talking about all of these things and more today, so let's get into it. They sound like random disconnected stories, but at the center of these shenanigans is API, or Application Programming Interface, which is the process by which different applications on the internet interact with each other. I am really, really giving you the Cliff Notes, Spark Notes explanation here, but essentially it works like this. Picture you're lost in Times Square and trying to get the 4 train. You might stop someone and ask them for directions, and the person would give you some sort of directions using words like left, right, north, south, and so on. API is the language that enables you to ask for directions

and to understand the rather tricky concept of how to move your body around in the world to find a hidden location. And the directions that you were given would make sense to any person lost in Times Square, so long as they spoke the same language. API is used when you pay for things with software like PayPal, and when you log into a website using an ID from another site. But API can also scale and get way more complicated. Like when you use a travel website to search for flights, the travel website can simultaneously ask

via API all the airlines about all of their flights for that day and all of their prices. Companies are also using API to consistently scan sites like Reddit and Twitter to train their AI chatbots and to make their search results better. In preparation for going public, Reddit decided to start charging for API access. Reddit's new rate is 24 cents per 1,000 API calls. For companies that expect to make billions of dollars off AI in the future, that seems like a modest investment. But they aren't the only ones using API to interact with Reddit. Many third-party apps used by Reddit moderators use API, and

Redditors with disabilities use API-enabled tech for accessibility, like apps that read posts out loud for blind Redditors. These users were not thrilled about the new rules. In protest, many Reddit communities went dark. Reddit has relented and said that they would allow apps focused on accessibility to continue to make API calls without paying. But all other third-party apps are in the process of winding down their services. Discussions with companies like Google have mostly remained behind closed doors. And it all comes back to why I am locked out of Twitter.

I am locked out of Twitter because Musk is also trying to profit from API scraping, or that's what he's reported as saying. He maintains no PR team, and I can't see Twitter, so who knows? At any rate, Musk has publicly said that companies were scraping Twitter for massive amounts of data, and he wanted to put a stop to that by limiting the number of tweets that can be viewed at a time. But if you do want to scrape Twitter, you can. You just have to pay Musk for it first. Google has been upfront by saying that it will continue to scrape the internet for all publicly available information to train its AI models. That, of course, makes sense from a business standpoint. The internet is full of content, and the more content you feed AI, the better it can learn.

What Google and Meta won't do is pay for content, though. Both companies have decided to stop sharing news from Canadian companies in response to a new Canadian law that would require them to pay publishers for content. Supporters of the law believe that it could bring in as much as $329 million Canadian dollars in revenue. That would be a major boost for the Canadian media industry. Australia has a similar law. When it was first enacted, Meta, Facebook and Instagram's parent company, blocked users from sharing news stories for a week but finally caved and started paying for the content. Similar legislation has been proposed in California, and as often happens, as California

goes, so goes the nation. So if it passes in California, it will probably have the effect of making it law in the entire land. These changes from API to legislation have already forced the closure of many businesses and changed the way other companies source and pay for information. Yet those payments could be a lifeline for struggling companies. These shakeups will also cause an unexpected financial reshuffling as we move into a future where AI rules and things on the internet cost money. For today's tip, you can take straight to the bank. If you want to pay $8 for Twitter, you rock on.

But hot tip, Instagram's competitor to Twitter, a new app called Threads, launched just yesterday. So be early to the party. Create an account, your username will transfer over from Instagram, and see if Threads can give you everything Twitter can and maybe more at zero cost. If you love threads so much that you delete your verified Twitter, you'll save yourself about a hundred bucks a year. Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network.

I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Levoy. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me. And follow us on Instagram at moneynews and

TikTok at moneynewsnetwork for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. No, seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.