The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free ❧ Current Affairs

Many argue that having this kind of information behind a paywall is bad for society, and even the institutions who pay these large subscriptions are getting sick of them.

First, do we want to live in a world where people pay for content? I’m not sure. For one, it presumes the most valuable things should be closed, when the beauty of the web is that that zero marginal cost of production means the most valuable things should reach whomever they are relevant to.

It's a surprising and unfortunate fact that the majority of the world's research, mostly conducted with public funding, is kept behind paywalls run by a tiny number of publishing corporations. But perhaps it doesn't have to be this way.

Information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive. In an ideal ecosystem, audiences would enjoy the universal accessibility of media, and creators would enjoy more pricing power and stable returns on media which appreciates in value.

At the core of this is a debate on whether The New York Times, The Washington Post and others are failing the American people by pushing more content behind the paywall.

In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship.

Free communication is not free. By decreasing the cost of information, we have decreased its value and invited its adulteration. To restore the health of our information ecosystem, we must understand the vulnerabilities of our overwhelmed minds and how the economics of information can be leveraged to protect us from being misled.

As Larry Summers and J. Bradford DeLong would write in August 2001, just a month after the file-sharing service Napster was taken down, ‘the most basic condition for economic efficiency … [is] that price equal marginal cost.’ They went on: ‘with information goods, the social and marginal cost of distribution is close to zero.’ This held true not on

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