Doc is writing about a meme we have got to get right early on.
One (not the only) general way to describe what’s important about the Net we knew is competition. The end-to-end Internet is a platform for fostering and supporting competition.
One general kind of competition that this platform will enable is competition between commercial and noncommercial content and innovation. A richer public domain, and more in the creative commons will mean more to choose among when creating or sharing or criticizing culture.
Competitors hate competition. They will always work to increase barriers to entry. And they will use a string of silly excuses to increase the barriers to the free.
We should resist these excuses. We should be fighting to preserve this competition. “How can you compete with free?” Jack Valenti asks, again and again? By making stuff better, again and again.
But the important point is this: It is wrong wrong wrong to bias the rules against the free. Free societies make closed societies harder to sustain. The same should be true of culture. If you find it hard to be closed and important, then either accept irrelevance or accept the Internet.
The irony is, of course, that bloggers would actually help boost the rankings of the Times’ articles if the links didn’t go stale after two weeks. You compete with free by letting the free make your resources more valuable. One wonders whether this will register with them or become yet another tar pit to struggle out of.
True, very true. But why is it that so many people just can’t see the value of the statement: “We’re stronger when we’re all strong together”? Is it that the people of this generation haven’t lived in jeopardy at all, and thus have never realized that any society is only as strong as its weakest link? Oh, it’s true that scale can mitigate this…but that only goes so many billions of dollars so far…
Or is it that the “decision makers” (sic) out there are just so set on the “me-Me-ME” thing that they just can’t let anybody in edgewise?
Of course…I hate to say it, but I love finding people like that. I do take a certain sadistic pleasure in deflating them, no matter how well monied…;)
I think that’s exactly it… it’s like Daffy Duck in that old Loony Tunes short, “Me, me me, mine, mine, mine! I’m rich I tells ya! I’m fantasically well off!” There’s an assumption that if you don’t control access in some way, your resources will inexorably diminish in value. Their thinking is obviously that since scarcity’s out of the question (barring server failure, of course), the value of the information drops to zero… but I would think that the value of the resource that’s really their stock in trade, their reputation, increases with every link. Assuming the relevance is a part of that, even critical links from the Andrew Sullivan, the Free Republic, or whomever else would only serve to increase their value.
Heh… Or do operational costs outweigh all that?