Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Information Rules

"Nowadays the problem is not information access but information overload. The real value produced by an information provider comes in locating, filtering and communicating what is useful to the consumer" (Varian 6). This quote is interesting because it brings out the fact that we have to wade through tons of useless information to get to what we need. But there is so much information out there that this is very difficult to do. Sure Google has made it much easier to filter content in order to get to our information, but what if net neutrality, the concept that every webpage gets to have equal bandwidth, doesn't play a role anymore. What if someone can just pay money to have their information show up the quickest, or at the forefront of all other information, does this beat out competition in a negative way?

This obviously creates problems since anyone with enough wealth can pay to have their information seen, which may not be the best or even the most relevant information available, but because they shelled out money, they get the attention. Is fair when you might be able to make a website with the "best" information but isn't able to get any views at all because you don't have the funding to pay your way to the top. This stifles innovation, creativity and even quality of content because all you need is money. The Google and Verizon deal is the perfect example of this loss of net neutrality, in which they both agreed that total and complete net neutrality will negatively affect the system. Of course there can be many positives that can come from this , but so much negative can also come from it. It is the doorway for others to jump on this, and bigger corporations will demand more and more that they have higher bandwidth. This basically allows those that are already on top stay ahead of the game while making it extremely difficult for newcomers to penetrate the industry.

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