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Competing Against Free
Matthew Yglesias has it right on Internet profitability:
But in the world of websites, it’s not clear that the ability to raise large sums of capital really is a huge advantage. The startup costs of a decent website are pretty small in the scheme of things. And there are lots of people and institutions—academics looking to bring their research to a wider public, think tanks and advocacy organizations looking to influence the public debate, corporations like Google looking to express their views on policy debates, students trying to get an edge in the job market, authors hoping to promote a book—with perfectly good incentives to run websites that don’t aspire to maximize profits.
Metering the Internet
If you’re someone who uses the Internet to do more than just check e-mail and browse through blogs (i.e., you download movies or music through BitTorrent), then this new proposal by a number of telecom giants, including Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner Cable, will likely put an end to that (although Comcast has already begun to heavily “shape” BitTorrent traffic without admitting it to their customers). I think this casts doubt upon the viability of deregulated and privatized telecoms, but even more so I think it threatens potential development in terms of video streaming and online media distribution, which is why most Internet-related businesses that aren’t telecoms, like Google, are opposed to this.