The new Verizon venture, forged from the merger of Yahoo and AOL, will sell personalization-as-a-service from Verizon customer data including phone call and call metadata, smartphone data usage and device telemetry — combined with Yahoo’s search history and cookies and AOL’s advertising and engagement data to help companies personalize their products and services.

When you never have to change the channel on your TV remote control because television will automatically play a mix of live TV, DVR recordings, and on-demand programming when you take your favorite spot on the living room sofa — you’ll have Oauth and the like to thank. And pay.

In effect, we’ll be paying companies to use and confirm our own identities in order for the right for them to sell our attention to us, by the gigabyte per second (gb/s). That’s instead of companies exchanging services or content for access to our behavior and personal details, like how the internet advertising model. You know, wherein media outlets digital publishers employ user accounts (identity and preferences) and cookies to track engagement and customize ads on the content they give away for free. Same thing.

Instead, we’ll exchange $ for the privilege of consuming sponsored content.

Oh wait. We already are.

Hulu's pricing plans

(Source: https://secure.hulu.com/signup)

Companies will pay to know what and when the next monetizable step in our behavior will be, so they can plan to deliver their goods and services to us “on demand.” Instead of paying for billboards and commercials, companies will buy our time and attention from these data purveyors who own our digital agenda.

It’ll start to get real real when personalization meets physical goods and services. Like when you never have to order food from a menu (because your favorite meal will be ready to be served to you when you arrive at the restaurant. Or when your Uber is waiting to take you to the show when you request the check at the restaurant where you just ate the perfect meal.

Personalization is the real AI. And the real AI will lie beneath the interface layer. It’ll be the engine that preorders what you want. The presentation or interface layer is too expensive to personalize automatically at scale. Greater returns will come from personalizing the sourcing and selection layers.

Don’t believe me? You don’t have to. It’s already happening.

Look at the Newsfeed. Facebook offloads content creation to publishers. The Newsfeed curates content for an audience of one: You. Facebook’s value add to users are the ratings (Likes) and comments. The presentation layer is reduced to headline, thumbnail, URL. Headline, thumbnail, URL. One story at a time.

It used to be that we sold our privacy piecemeal to social networks for access and social content. Now social networks sell fragments of our attention and the probability of our engagement as a sorting algorithm to publishers.