The end of free? Please, let it be!: Charles Cooper of CNET News.com believes that content was neither born free, nor was it meant to be that way. The Internet may have been a promising, if not revolutionary, vehicle for commerce and communications–but it hardly repealed fundamental laws of economics. In the real world, there are bills to pay.
“It is said that a free republic demands a free and vigilant fourth estate, but you get what you pay for. I can get all the opinion and reports about other reports from the gazillions of Web logs that spring up every day on the Internet. They are valuable, but only up to a point. Will they be the ones to break the next Watergate or Iran-Contra scandal? I very much doubt it. They don’t have the reporting chops, the desire or the financial wherewithal to conduct the sort of long-running investigations that can topple governments.”
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post