Information as a Product

The economics behind information itself is something I had never really stopped to consider until reading this chapter, which is kind of strange considering how interested I am in technology - the Internet in particular. The two concepts do seem to fit together pretty well.

Obviously there has to be an economy for producing new information and there is an economy for putting the information in containers and selling those, but forming an economy around the information alone still seems somewhat foreign to me.

Maybe this can be explained by the fact that since I grew up with computers and the Internet, the idea of information as something freely available and easily sharable is somewhat ingrained into my way of thinking. Treating information, which is something intangible, the same as a product you’d buy off the shelf of a store (the details are different, obviously, but just as a general idea) seems not only unusual to me, but also perhaps kind of wrong.

With just a simple search term in Google you can find out just about anything you could want to know. The Internet, one of the only mediums that makes selling information outside of a container even possible, also renders the idea pretty much unnecessary by its very nature.

If you include intellectual property in your definition of information, then there are some decent examples of models selling information without a container. For instance, consider Apple and its iTunes store which sells music without any type of container and also includes protection (at least on most of its content for the time being) to keep the content exclusive to that service.

So, just because it seems strange and has never really occurred to me before doesn’t mean the idea can’t work, apparently.