Is the future of content on the internet free or not?

Is the era of free news and content on the internet history? Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp Inc. certainly thinks so, while others a experimenting and thinking about the future of ‘free’.

According to Murdoch, newspapers have themselves to blame for the loss of readers. They shouldn’t have put their content online for free! To make sure that ‘free’ is now history on the internet, Murdochs’ News Corp Inc. is going to charge online readers in newspapers such as the Ney York Post, The Sun and The London Times. Readers already had to pay to access the Wall Street Journal website since last year.

On the other side of the discussion you have several writers and thinkers who predict that the future of content such as music and movies will be free. Also, already free email services are already experimenting with unlimited storage space for its users. The reason is that developments in information and communication technologies are allowing greater information exchanges at faster speeds. Effective control of copyrighted works (such as music in mp3 format) is thus lost.

A prominent writer in this field is Chris Anderson (also know from the article/book ‘The Long Tail’), who wrote an article about the future of free business models. Hypebot, a music, technology and new music business blog hosted a ‘Free Week’ last month, with articles containing the opinions of music industry professionals on the future of ‘free’. Although it is not necessarily true that all agreed ‘free’ was the right way to go, the conclusion was that ‘free’ was is not stoppable anymore. The sentence “Let's stop debating free and start debating how to do free right” summarises the thoughts on content of others than Murdoch well.

Well known one-liners such as “You either compete with free or use free” seems to be applied increasingly by artists, who give away their music (partly) for free and earn an income through other means. Another leading thinker and writer, Kevin Kelly, described in an article how one can earn how it is possible to earn revenue with a ‘free’ business model. In the mass-copy world of the internet he differentiates 8 uncopyable values, which can be monetised: Immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and finability (read the article for an explanation of these values).

Only time will tell how users respond to paid news-services, which they have gotten used to as being a free source of information.