The Internet Economy

There have been a bunch of ideas on the Internet that, if you were to mention it to anyone 20-30 years ago, would have been laughed at, but because the Internet evolved the way it did, it has allowed the kind of use that no one would have expected.

Let's start with free email. Back in the day, when free email was available, you were limited to 10 MB or so of email space. Anything more and you'd have to pay for it. Let your email account stay idle, and it would get deleted. GMail, Google's mail, changed that. It offered free email with 1 GB of space, which was considered outrageously huge for the time. Needless to say, many companies had to fall in line.

Best yet, it was free.

But here's one that's even wilder. YouTube.

Think of a business that would allow any user, for free, to upload as many videos as they wanted. This has allowed people an outlet to make their videos available anywhere. With cheap camcorders, the most expensive part of the video making process is the computer itself.

Without the "free" part, a video site would have a tiny fraction of the videos it has now. That has its pluses and minuses. Because anyone can upload a video, a site like YouTube has tremendously more videos than it would otherwise. Free speaks to people like nothing else. That is both good and bad. It allows a great deal of freedom to video creators, but places an immense burden on the site to keep the presumably millions of videos accessible.

This notion of free, I'm sure, appeals to a great deal of computer types who would like to see all notions of digital stuff for free. Free songs, free videos, free software, and so forth.

Are we ready to see real content like that for free or not? Right now, the industry says no, since it wants to make money on content by "real" singers and directors and actors and so forth.

But the Internet has seen things as strange.

You never know.