Shapiro & Varian talk about information goods the way most talk about data, as a commodity to be turned into profit. Selling information in the Age of Information creates an entirely different economy, where the market price of "goods" does not depend on the production cost any longer; sellers set prices based on the value information has to its market (Shapiro & Varian 3). Their approach to information is purely business-like. Cold, and nothing like Barlow.
Barlow describes Information as a living thing, a relationship, an activity. He says on page 7, "Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods... Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time."
Barlow describes Information as a living thing, a relationship, an activity. He says on page 7, "Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods... Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time."
Eventually, Shapiro and Varian hit a point that agrees with Barlow – marketing one's intellectual property involves establishing authority: building a reputation to convince the market to buy one's product without knowing whether the product is good yet. Shapiro and Varian call this building brand name, and Barlow calls it point of view. Barlow, on page 10, writes "Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away... In aesthetic information, whether poetry or rock 'n' roll, people are willing to buy the new product of an artist, sight-unseen, based on their having been delivered a pleasurable experience by previous work."
On page 8, Shapiro & Varian make a huge mistake. They argue that the Web "isn't all that impressive as an information resource. The static, publicly accessible HTML text on the Wen is roughly equivalent in size to 1.5 million books. The UC Berkeley Library has 8 million volumes, and the average quality of the Berkeley library content is much, much higher! If 10 percent of the material on the Web is 'useful,' there are about 150,000 useful book-equivalents on it, which is about the size of a Borders superstore. But the actual figure for 'useful' is probably more like 1 percent, which is 15,000 books, or half the size of an average mall bookstore."
Shapiro & Varian could not have underestimated the Web more in 1999, when their book was published.
I have no way to confirm whether their statistics were true 14 years ago, but saying only 10% of the information on the Web is useful is an incredible oversight. They continue on page 9 to describe the usefulness of the Web's immediate access factor, but even there they lack a complete picture.
The Web, whether a majority of its content is "useful" or not, is much more impressive than Shapiro & Varian give it credit for – even as a marketing tool, which they seem to be limited to in their focus here. The Web is not just immediate and widely accessible – it has cracked the code, broken the barriers, for information to cross time and space. Their library metaphor shows just how diminutive their take is. With information on the Web, there is no longer a need to physically go where information is to access it, and people no longer have to be on synchronized schedules to share information.
They say the Web enhances the value of information (9), but it also enhances the scope of its audience, enabling those with an idea or product to share to reach people who they never could have in physical space or time. Shapiro & Varian seriously overlooked that characteristic of networking technology, which has made commerce explode online.
When it comes to law and technology meshing, the two sets of authors hold strongly contrasting ideals. Shapiro & Varian write, "The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in the 1890s to control monopolies. Technology has changed radically since then. As we have stressed, the underlying economic principles have not. As a new century arrives, the Sherman Act is flexible enough to prevent the heavy hand of monopoly from stifling innovation, while keeping markets competitive enough to stay the even heavier hand of government regulation intruding in our dynamic hardware and software markets" (17-18).
Barlow writes, "Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome" (6)
In my view, Barlow was closer to the truth here. If anything has become apparent in the struggle between technology growth and the stagnation of the law, it is the latter's inability to keep up with the former.
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