The Hidden Cost of a Subscription Internet

Over the last few months, I have mentored a handful of kids that were a part of the Ready Leaders Foundation Inaugural events in December 2025. We have been meeting on a regular basis to discuss how we can work together to get them to a place where they are setting themselves up to be in the best position to maximize their skills on and off the basketball court. Essentially, we are working on the preparation part of the old saying “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”.

Unfortunately in the last few weeks, something alarming has become more and more apparent to me. The internet has changed a lot since I was in their shoes. I can already see some of you rolling your eyes because, yes, of course the internet and the world has changed in the last decade. Please stay with me, I am talking about a very specific change.

A couple of weeks ago during one of my discussions with my mentees, we talked about the importance of tracking workouts and writing things down, because the ability to look back and measure progress allows you to understand what is working, what has stopped working, and what adjustments you need to make.

I told him about Eliud Kipchoge, the first person to break the two-hour marathon barrier and arguably one of the greatest marathoners we have seen. A few years ago, I watched an interview where Kipchoge discussed his training journals and showed the stacks of notebooks he had accumulated throughout his career. Over decades, he had kept meticulous notes of his workouts, his training plans, and how he felt physically and mentally from day to day.

While that level of meticulousness and detailed records is not a requirement for the highest level of success, it was one pathway that had proven successful for one of the most elite athletes of our generation, I thought it was a good example to explore for this mentee. So I told him, “Go look it up. I’m sure you can find the video or the article discussing Kipchoge’s journals.”

A few days later, this mentee came back and told me he could not find anything he could access.

Now, knowing this particular student has had issues with information agency in the past, I decided to fact check him. Imagine my surprise when I started searching for myself and realized that almost every article I could find about Kipchoge’s journaling and his approach to documenting his workout was behind a paywall.

This was not an isolated moment. Over the course of our regular conversations, I had recommended courses that used to be readily available. I had shared resources on athletic development, I had sent videos and materials that I thought would help him improve.

More and more often, the response was the same.

“Oh, they’re selling a course.”

“Oh, I need a subscription to access this.”

“Oh, I have to pay before I can learn more.”

And that is where my concern started to grow.

This is not really about one Kipchoge article, It is about something much bigger. One of the biggest lessons I try to teach the students in Ready Leaders Foundation is agency. Do not wait for someone to hand you opportunities - search the internet, read, ask questions and learn from people who are doing things you aspire to do. This is the pattern that worked for me.

When I was growing up, one of the greatest promises of the internet was access. If you were curious enough, you could learn almost anything. You could study how successful founders built companies, learn from athletes, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs etc. If you wanted to figure something out, someone had probably written about it. I remember learning my signature basketball move, the step through by watching a video on YouTube of Chamique Holdsclaw within my first year of picking up a basketball. That was the magic of the internet.

That didn’t mean every piece of information was free, but enough of it was that curiosity was usually rewarded. Today, I find myself recommending articles, interviews, research papers, and case studies only to discover that many of them are locked behind paywalls.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the biggest problem isn’t even the paywall itself. It’s what gets left behind. If the highest-quality information, expert analysis, thoughtful essays, and original reporting increasingly move behind subscriptions, what remains freely available? Too often it is opinions rather than fact, people confidently explaining subjects they’ve never actually studied, content that optimizes for algorithms instead of truth.

What does this mean for a whole generation of learners that are coming up? If high quality information is continuously commoditized, does the gap between those who have access and those who do not continue to widen?

Class issues have always existed and education has always been the great equalizer. What happens when that education is now too expensive to be accessed. People don’t stop learning because good information becomes inaccessible, they simply learn from whoever is still free but what is the average person then learning?

I want to be clear about something before anyone misunderstands my point. This isn’t an argument against paying creators - journalists deserve to be paid, researchers deserve to be paid, writers deserve to build sustainable businesses and independent creators should absolutely be able to earn a living from their work. I subscribe to publications myself because I believe good work deserves support. The question that keeps bothering me is this:

If information is the currency of opportunity, what happens when opportunity becomes subscription-based?

This worries me because I see it through the eyes of the young people I mentor.

When I recommend an article about leadership, productivity, finance, or personal development, I’m recommending a chance to think differently and sometimes that one article changes how someone approaches their career, or their work ethic.

What happens when those moments become available only to people who can afford another monthly subscription?

I’m not suggesting everything should be free. I don’t even know if there’s an easy answer. Collecting quality information is expensive and experts deserve compensation for their work but I also believe knowledge is one of humanity’s greatest public goods.

The internet was at its most transformative when it dramatically lowered the cost of learning. My fear is that we’re slowly reversing that progress, one paywall and one subscription at a time. This is the hidden cost of the subscription internet.

The internet used to reward curiosity but now it increasingly rewards purchasing power and if we’re not careful, we’ll end up building a world where the people with resources have access to thoughtful reporting, expert perspectives, critical nuances and everyone else gets whatever is free enough to capture attention. This is absolutely going to lead to a huge critical thinking gap.

I don’t know what the solution is, maybe publishers will find new business models, maybe philanthropists will fund more open access, maybe AI will eventually help democratize high-quality knowledge instead of flooding the internet with synthetic content.

I genuinely hope so.

Until then, I think those of us who have access carry a responsibility to teach, share and maintain materials that allow high quality learning to continue in and around our societies.