Great post over on Crooked Timber about Google, and how some things of great social worth are not worth buying… and how even some things of great economic worth are not necessarily worth buying. Google, for example, provides a heck of a lot of economic value to its users… but that doesn’t make Google any money, so that may not increase the monetary value of the company.
The general problem is that, in an economy dominated by public goods, like that of the Internet, there’s no reason to expect any relationship between economic value and capacity to raise revenue. Things of immense social value (this blog, for example!) are given away because there’s no point doing anything else. On the other hand significant profits can be made by those who can find a suitable choke point, even if they haven’t actually contributed anything of value. Assuming for the moment that SCO prevails in its attempts to extract revenue from Linux users, it won’t be because SCO’s code was better than some free alternative but simply because it was widely distributed before anyone found out it was copyrighted.
If the Internet continues to grow in economic importance, the central role of public goods in its formation will pose big problems for capitalism, though not necessarily to the benefit of traditional forms of socialism.
Secretly Ironic 