Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Andy Ostroy, Democrat and entrepreneur, thinks the Internet is largely to blame for not only the current economic troubles, but also the fraying of the nation’s social fabric. It all boils down to that nasty word: free. The Internet is all about things being free, Ostroy insists, and that’s killing the United States. Free has never been part of any successful business model, and yet people have allowed the Internet to evolve to where we expect something for nothing without any foresight for what this would mean, until now.
“Consider how much money has literally been sucked out of America’s GDP by this rapacious beast which resides in our laptops, PC’s, iPhones and Blackberries,” Ostroy writes. “Look how it’s destroyed the music business, travel agencies, the publishing industry. It’s killed the movie after-markets, like DVD. Look at the strikes it’s caused in Hollywood, because somehow studios think that viewing content on a computer screen instead of a TV screen somehow gives license to screw writers out of their residuals.”
And then there are the indirect money losses that businesses have suffered from the Internet’s ballooning social networking. “Think of all the money not spent in cafes, bars, lounges, restaurants, clubs, video stores, and book stores because of the proliferation of impersonal, intimacy-starved social-networking sites and free-content sites.”
Only now after the economy has tanked will leaders realize “capitalism and free are about as successful a marriage as Karl Rove and Queer Eye’s Carson Kressley.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
How the Internet is Killing Our Economy (The Ostroy Report)
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