The Internet is a commons; the commons are tragic.

MBA — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:45:39 +0000

I first heard of the Tragedy of the Commons in my high school economics class. The classic example of this concept is an open field where animals, say sheep, are free to graze. Because it’s free, all the shepherds bring their sheep to the common plot of land and, consequently, leave it completely destroyed and useless by overusing it. Their rational behavior of using the free land harms others and, ultimately, themselves. Ideally, to maximize the total use of the land, there should be a limit on how many sheep can graze on it. To limit the degradation of public (often environmental) resources, governments impose all sorts of restrictions, taxes, licensing requirements, and the like. The moral of the story here is that if you have a free common resource, people will abuse it to the point at which it provides next to no value to everyone.

Now, several people, most famously Lawrence Lessig, have compared the Internet to a commons, often in the name of fighting proposed restrictions like net neutrality. But, is it really possible to have a commons without a tragedy? At least when it comes to the Internet, I’m not sure. Imagine that the Internet is that pasture of land I just mentioned, and every time a site goes up, it is consuming precious resources and making the whole Internet less valuable. Is that not exactly what’s happened? Not only is there more crap—more useless crap—online than ever before, but the Internet has become less valuable to site owners. That is, there’s so much ad inventory out there, that it’s pretty much impossible to monetize a site with ad revenue these days. And it’s only getting worse right now. So, before you start that website, just remember that you are overfishing our oceans and destroying our pastures and polluting our air and creating acid rain and ruining our eyes and bankrupting the valuable websites that you love. So, please, please, I beg you: Stop.

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The Internet is a commons; the commons are tragic.