What’s Your Broadband Price?

I read an interesting article in The Lever titled, Everybody Has a Price – And Corporations Know Yours. The article discusses how the massive data collection of our personal shopping and browsing habits, along with machine learning algorithms, has allowed marketing firms to paint an individual profile of everybody. The article conjectures that this might lead to personalized pricing where we are each offered prices for products and services based on what the algorithms think we are willing to pay. This is something that economists study in school as a thought experiment because individual pricing is the way for companies to extract the most revenue from the public. There is evidence that this has been tried in broadband. In 2022, the California Community Foundation conducted research that looked at the online prices offered by Charter in various neighborhoods in Los Angeles. They were surprised to find widespread price discrimination where people on streets with higher incomes were offered lower prices than people only a block or two away where housing prices and incomes were lower.