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can book their own flights with Expedia instead of playing blind-
man’s bluff with a travel agent. (“Got any flights after 4 PM to
Frankfurt?”) All the garage crafters selling their goods on Etsy.
com. All the publishers selling obscure books through Amazon
that no physical bookstore was willing to carry. The
salwar kameez
tailors in India selling bespoke clothes to westerners via eBay,
without intervention by a series of skimming intermediaries. The
Internet-era musicians who use the Net to pack venues all over
the world by giving away their recordings on social services like
MySpace. Hell, look at my last barber, in Los Angeles: the man
doesn’t use a PC, but I found him by googling for “barbers” with
my postcode — the information economy is driving his cost of
customer acquisition to zero, and he doesn’t even have to actively
participate in it.
Better access to more information is the hallmark of the infor-
mation economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have,
the faster our networks get, and the better our search tools get,
the more economic activity the information economy generates.
Many of us sell information in the information economy — I sell
my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and
architects and consultants are in the information business and
they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but
an info-broker — but none of us rely on curtailing access to infor-
mation. Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by
supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition.
The world’s governments might have bought into the old myth
of the information economy, but not so much that they’re willing
to ban the PC and the Internet.
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