Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures offers a nicely nuanced view on the Free debate: "Both sides of the debate about Free do not seem to acknowledge how
fundamentally different the relationship between suppliers and
consumers is on the web. Services are not offered for free at all.
There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material - data, content, and meta-data, and the network
where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still
governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not
dollars, it's attention. The network that takes attention and converts
it into insight is also quite different than a traditional firm. The
services they provide are more like those we expect from a government
than a company. Craigslist, Facebook, and Twitter all provide (or try
to provide) a robust stable reliable infrastructure (hosting,
bandwidth), security, safety, and dispute resolution. In all three
cases, the product users create and consume emerges organically from
this environment."
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