Who generally profits from the content that the collective creates for free?
The only business model for aggregated or collectivized information- information that isn’t bought and sold directly- is the routing of advertising. Everything but advertising becomes free. It isn’t the advertisers who become rich in the long term, because there are fewer and fewer things to be sold, other than ads. It is the owner of the ad exchange that becomes rich. At the moment this means Google for most purposes, though in the financial sphere there are other parties playing an analogous role. (I should say that I personally know the Google folks, and like them. They didn’t have an evil plan- but they did find themselves in a niche that is problematic.) Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth. The body starts consuming itself. That is what we are doing online. As more and more human activity is aggregated, people huddle around the last remaining oases of revenue. Musicians today might still be
