Stephen Downes

It feels like, with the economic crunch fully upon us, that the battle between the free internet and the pay internet is reaching a new stage. Traditional content agencies are becoming desperate and declaring "the end of free". Now this has nothing to do - as James Farmer suggests - with whether people are sufficiently grateful for the charity of the service providers. It has, in my view, everything to do with the sort of economic model we, as a global society, want to pursue - one which favours large, entrenched, and powerful corporate media, or small, agile, independent voices. And whether we are willing to pay for what the corporate world provides.