Monday, May 09, 2011

Digital Economy and P2P

To recap, my central thesis about the Digital Economy is that there is not a single technologically determined outcome, but that the outcome will depend upon choices made by the various "actors". To put it another way, people matter.

Stilgherrian in his Patch Monday podcast today interviews Michael Bauwens who is described on Wikipedia as a "Belgian peer-to-peer theorist".

One of his on-line contributions The Political Economy of Peer Production gives a good insight into what his theories are and what the policy "issues" are.

Against this mindset I would position the view of traditional telcos who see their role in life as to mediate the comms necessary. The other position remains that of firms that still believe in integration models.

The policy frontiers to maximise the value of 'peer production" include recognising the importance of IPv6 and why large telcos think it isn't a problem, and competition policy where we need to revise our view of the size of firms and number of participants in markets (smaller firms, bigger number of players) and write aggressive law to match.



Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

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