The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
There is an old saying that information wants to be free. Online, information really has two choices: be free, or be very, very expensive. The New York Times announced last week that they were opening up their website to all readers for free. While the majority of the Times has always been free, for the last several years, they restricted access to certain parts of their website, their very popular op-ed section and their archives. No more. As of last week, this Times Select section, which they were charging $49.95 / year to access, is now free for all readers. The same is true for much of their archives; unrestricted free access. The Times learned their lesson. With almost all of the content that can be moved online migrating there, businesses are only hurting themselves by not allowing an audience instant access to their content. When things first started moving online, many people thought that a lot of the cost of online content might be managed through micropayments. People would create an online wallet of some sort, pre-authorize a small amount of money to be released into it (say $10 to $20) and then spend this, a few cents at a time, to purchase access to special pages of a newspaper, read a magazine article, or watch a video. The problems were several. At the time, web designers couldn't figure out how to write computer code efficient enough to access a wallet system day after day for only a few cents. The cost of the transaction was more expensive than the content itself would cost. A second problem was that we all decided we didn't want to pay a few cents for everything. With the rise of blogs, YouTube and podcasting, we didn't need to rely on the big media companies for our content. What we couldn't find online, we would just make ourselves. The other side of the equation was with companies that decided their information was far too valuable to be free. Stewart Brand was first quoted in 1984 as saying that information is a valuable commodity because the right information at the right time can change your life. Many companies have decided that the only other choice was for their information to be very expensive. Consulting companies offering specialized services, accounting companies able to sell their services globally, and people with skills who could market themselves on the world stage all began to make money no matter where they were located on the globe. As more countries and towns received good broadband internet service, more people were able to be knowledge workers without having to relocate to a major population centre. Where these two movements clash is where a lot of trouble can be found. Cyberpunks, hackers, and phreakers break into networks around the world, saying they are freeing information from capitalist hands who want to charge for it. Almost the entire eastern European nation of Estonia, one of the most technologically advanced countries in Europe, was knocked off-line last year by Russian hackers who were upset with the country's ISPs and media policies. Denial-of-service attacks, basically bombarding servers with millions of information requests each second, can cost companies millions of dollars. Information may want to be free, and more of it is certainly moving that way, but it always costs someone a lot of money to free it up. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
