When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.
As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.
Open-source encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and search engines such as Google and Bing, which people can tap into anytime and anywhere via computers and smart phones, put a world of knowledge at our fingertips at a lower cost than ever before.
Our tradition in this country has not been to deny health information to interested individuals when they claim that they can handle it and are willing to pay for the cost of getting it.
Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.
We were nearly one of the last to realize that in the age of information science the most expensive asset is knowledge.
Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.
The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.
It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.
The Internet, the camera cellphone and the like have not only sped up the world's information uptake, but they have cheapened that which they capture.
Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well. You cannot have your news reduced to 140 characters or less without losing large parts of it. You cannot manipulate the news but not expect it to be manipulated against you. You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs. If as a culture we can learn this lesson, and if we can learn to love the hard work, we will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way.
