Isn’t the point here that it was the path the free information ideology inadvertently produced: (free) information served with ads (because everyone needs butter on the bread)? And because of that ingrained ideology, it’s still difficult to charge for the actual information product?
That ideology had nothing to do with the use of spying coupled with advertising ("targeted ads" in their modern sense) causing the creation of rents-seeking monopolies in the online ads space. The tech that enabled that was really just a few things (Javascript that could make and modify requests while also being able to hook into various user-generated events being a huge one, though not the only one) and I don't think many or any of those were developed for the purposes of information freedom or whatever, in particular.
And anyway "information wants to be free" is more descriptive than it is ideological. It's a statement about what tends to happen to information. Cheap Internet access and cheap storage have changed how that works so much that it's qualitatively different from the previous status quo ("the medium is the message") but the tech creating that would've probably looked pretty similar regardless of whether the inventors thought it was wrong to pay for information (which I doubt most did anyway).
[EDIT] TL;DR: "information wants to be free" isn't a statement about the ethics of charging money for information, and the reasons that advertising won on the web and the reasons monopolies took those over rather than even small or midsized publications being able to continue getting by with their own ad sales desk wouldn't have anything to do with anyone subscribing to that notion anyway. It's an entirely incorrect association.
Right. Ads don't generate substantial income for the book authors. And TFA actually complains about that, as the context for bringing up the supposed flow from "information wants to be free" to ads.
But now that I think of it, ads do reflect the fact that "information wants to be free". But in this case, it's information about users, which gets monetized through behavioral advertising markets.
Yeah my point is just that 1) "information wants to be free" is an observation more than a statement of purpose, and 2) I don't think fighting against dirty ol' authors who are trying to charge for their work was on anyone's mind, more or less, when designing the technologies under the modern Web. The way things shook out was some combination of an accident and inevitable. I doubt many or any of them thought charging money for, say, books or magazines was a bad thing. That's just... not what any of this is about.
Even if the Free Software movement (which I think is what she's trying to get at?) sometimes bleeds over into other areas, its ideological roots are in retaining user control of software in particular because software's a tool, not keeping people from charging money for novels or history books or newspaper articles or whatever.
[EDIT] that is, actual ideological informational-freedom anarchists—that is, not just opportunistic pirates—are rare and aren't and have never been in power to any substantial degree, even in the software world. The whole premise of that part is a big misunderstanding.
Well, as an old-school "ideological informational-freedom anarchist", "information wants to be free" for me was always mostly about the Internet as a workaround against censorship, and domination via propaganda.
Book Post here! If you listen to the Lanier interview, or read his recent books, he spells out the connection between free internet and the advertising model. I’m not a tech person, but it was my experience that in the 90s there was very little support for building revenue models into how people receive digital information. Those who were betting on the digital economy and building the monopolies we have now understood that their earnings would come from monetizing user information. “Advertising” is a shorthand for this. If fighting against authors wasn’t on people’s mind when they were building the web, they weren’t thinking ahead. The outcome has been that there is no solid mechanism hitching revenue to those who generate intellectual property.
> The outcome has been that there is no solid mechanism hitching revenue to those who generate intellectual property.
But how could there be? With 1985-2000 tech, and remembering how pretty much every DRM scheme so far's either failed miserably or been so invasive and flakey that it'd never have been accepted for mass media, and that even the failures have made "legitimate" products worse than their pirated counterparts. We have subscriptions—that hasn't helped much. We can very effectively gate off pages from those we don't want to see them.
It's not Information Freedom folks trying to stick it to those who want to charge money for writing any more than the record industry was trying to weaken the social value of semi-skilled music-playing family and friends. Both happened but that wasn't the point, it's just how things shook out.
I'm very open to arguments that either of those was bad and maybe even that their harm isn't made up for by the benefits the two technologies provide, but to whatever extent the Web is anti-author or anti-creator it's not some conspiracy (in the usual sense—I don't mean that as a slight) but just what it is. The printing press hurt some people. Recorded music hurt some people. Film and talkies hurt some people. I don't think anyone developing film audio recording & sync technology, or even those involved in its use, were much interested in harming a bunch of silent film actors per se, right? But how would you even develop that tech without doing so? You'd make it way different and much worse somehow, I guess, if it could be done at all. Same here.
Thank you for your reply! I don’t mean to point fingers, just trying to look at the structure. The built-in incentives and pace of technological advance pushed digital communication toward consolidation and estrangement of revenues from creators. It looks from this side like, had Google and Facebook not developed an overwhelming advantage in the acquisition of user data, advertising would still be generating value for newsrooms and that would be going to writers. Had Amazon not used predatory pricing to undermine competition (bookstores) and merchants (publishers), Bezos might be less rich but we might have a competitive online retail market that returned more value to the source. It seems possible that an idealistic vision of the benefit of open communications might have clouded from view the dangers posed by hinging revenue to the collection of user data (the ease of spreading disinformation, the decoupling of revenue from content creation). Funding businesses and technologies that collected revenue (easily, unobtrusively) from users might have led to a more healthy, democratic, transparent digital environment. Not trying to look back and place blame, just understand causes and imagine a constructive future. Welcome a more informed understanding!
Edit: missing word