Profits and the Information Economy (Re: De Long on network economy

[Chris Beggy]

Nathan Newman wrote:
> 
> 
> Yahoo is a good example.  Its whole value is based on its position as a
> key piece of real estate where you can reach so many other places from it.
> And how did it get that way?  Because it started as part of the "public
> space" of the early Internet when various people did the work themselves
> of telling Yahoo where they were.  A lot of unpaid social labor went into
> creating the whole Yahoo system of categorized information.  Because of
> that, it is extremely hard for any competitor to fully replicate and
> compete with Yahoo unless they can induce a similar free expenditure of
> social labor on their behalf.  Otherwise, the costs of doing the same
> categorization through paid labor would be prohibitive.
> 

Maybe extremely hard, but nevertheless
the Yahoo creation process is being duplicated at:

    http://www.dmoz.org

which is building the Open Directory.  As a matter of
fact, there continue to be many "public space" benefits
of the early internet which are protected by the Gnu
Public License(GPL), and therefore are likely to remain
public.  Please take a look at http://www.fsf.org to
find out more about the free software movement.

The mail archive for lbo-talk resides on a computer
whose operating system, Linux, is protected by the GPL
and widely available at no cost.  The software that runs
about half of the web servers in the internet world,
Apache, is free, open source software.

I don't dispute that internet capitalists continue to harvest,
package, and market these public creations for profit.
There is evidence though, that the capitalists are to
some extent convinced, embarrassed (or gently extorted) into 
giving back resources to the communities from which the assets
arose.

Chris