There’s No Such Thing as a Free Digital Lunch

Recently, both The New York Times (NYT) and TIME revealed their respective plans for erecting paywalls on their websites. It’s been expressed that they would have to be careful in how they handle this as they are now asking people to pay for something which they had previously been receiving at no cost. The shortsightedness of this statement struck me and made me realize that people are still clinging to a basic misconception about the internet. I’m referring to the myth that information wants to be free.

Firstly, all due respect to Stewart Brand and his often misquoted and misinterpreted statement on this topic, but information does not want to be free. People want it to be free because people want everything to be free. But this was always unrealistic. Even if, as Brand mentioned in his statement, information could get cheaper as distribution costs would get lower all the time, the cost to produce it in the first place is still there. Think about everything that goes into producing content for a newspaper. You have the reporters’ time and travel expenses, you have foreign bureaus that need to be maintained for such global news as the recent unrest in Egypt, you have editors and fact checkers who vet and shape the content, lawyers on retainer in the case of potential litigation, etc. And these costs have to be passed along to the consumer in order for the newspaper to stay afloat. When you consider these things, the notion of free content quickly evaporates.

Secondly, regarding the aforementioned shortsightedness, people are looking at this from the wrong perspective. People have been paying for newspapers and magazines for decades upon decades. This is the norm and they’re far more accustomed to this than to getting it for free. Free was a brief respite during the internet’s infancy when media companies and everyone else were going through trial and error to figure out the best way to live on the web. Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, once said that Eric Schmidt, now former CEO of Google, told him that one of the mistakes companies like his made was thinking and promoting the idea that the web could be free. What we’re seeing now is simply a return to the natural order of things and, I believe, a healthier, more stable internet.