Follow up to a follow up to a follow up to this story. I love the Internet!
The very thing that made the internet great was the free-ness of it.
The internet was democratizing. It equalized all of us. No matter how rich, how poor, what country you were in, your politics, the politics of your leaders, business pressures, economic woes, civil and social instability — the internet was there, outside of their touch, and we could spread information. No longer did you need to live near a university library, you could read it online. Someone in the middle of the Gobi desert can look up information on how to treat a snake bite. A young kid can get fascinated with telephone tones and just tell people about it. That’s what made the internet great.
And now, the author is claiming that this democratization is bad.
When the Internet first broke on the world scene in the mid-1990`s, the majority of content was academic. That was, after all, the Internet’s purpose up to that point. But there’s only so much truly free academic content available, and the vast majority of it is indeed freely available, even today, on the Internet.
But not all content is, nor should it be, free. Not free as in without cost. Academics produce content for the sake of producing…
