[ox] the Economy of Sharing - a third mode of production
- From: "Franz Nahrada" <f.nahrada reflex.at>
- Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 11:13:05 +0100
Ich denke das ist ein entscheidender Schritt: die Keimform wird
wahrgenommen, wenn auch zun?chst gesellschaftlich auf wenige Bereiche
beschr?nkt. Mir gef?llt immer wieder die lustige Parallele zwischen der
heutigen und der franz?sischen Revolution. Der "dritte Stand" nannte sich
so, weil er weder Adel noch Kirche war (und doch von beiden als zunehmend
ebenb?rtig wahrgenommen wurde), der "dritte Sektor" nennt sich heute so,
weil er weder Markt noch Staat ist (und immer mehr gebraucht wird).
Langsam beginnt das Bewu§tsein um sich zu greifen, da§ wir es hier aber
auch mit einem "dritten Modus der Produktion" zu tun haben.
relayed by <jamyang openflows.org>
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The economics of sharing
http://openflows.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/10/0923212&mode=thread&tid=10
posted Wednesday February 09, @11:15PM
Feb 3rd 2005, From The Economist print edition
Technology increases the ability of people to share, but will they share
more than just technology?
BY NOW, most people who use computers have heard of the "Open Source"
movement, even if they are not sure what it is. It is a way of making
software (and increasingly, other things as well), which relies on the
individual contributions of thousands of programmers. The resulting
programs are owned by no one and are free for all to use. The software
is copyrighted only to ensure it remains free to use and enhance. In
essence, therefore, open source involves two things: putting spare
capacity (geeks' surplus time and skill) into economic production; and
sharing.
Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a
Modality of Economic Production.
Yale Law Journal, November 2004
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested
people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources. Their
understanding, though, is much clearer than it was 20 or 30 years ago:
co-operation, especially when repeated, can breed reciprocity and trust,
to the benefit of all. In the context of open source, much has been
written about why people would share technical talent, giving away
something that they also sell by holding a job in the
information-technology industry. The reason often seems to be that
writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their
peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market,
not to mention that they also find it fun.
The characteristics of information - be it software, text or even biotech
research - make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a
"non-rival"good: ie, your use of it does not interfere with my use.
Better still, there are network effects: ie, the more people who use it,
the more useful it is to any individual user. Best of all, the existence
of the internet means that the costs of sharing are remarkably low. The
cost of distribution is negligible, and co-ordination is easy because
people can easily find others with similar goals and can contribute when
convenient.
The question is, can sharing be used to supply more than just
information? One of the most articulate proponents of the open-source
approach, Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School, argues in a recent paper*
that sharing is emerging for certain physical, rivalrous goods and will
probably increase due to advances in technology. Where open source was
about sharing information by way of the internet, what is happening now,
Mr Benkler notes, is the sharing of the tangible tools of technology
themselves, like computing power and bandwidth. This is because they are
widely distributed among individuals, and sold in such a way that there
is inherent (and abundant) unused capacity.
Consider computing power. By some measures, the world's most powerful
supercomputer is not owned by NEC or IBM, but is a volunteer project
called SETI home that aggregates the spare processing power of around 4m
computers. When an individual's PC is idle, a screen-saver application
that users have downloaded kicks in and harnesses the computer's
processor to decode radio signals in search of extra-terrestrial life.
A basic PC chip is a rivalrous good, but it provides far more power than
most computer owners ever use. So putting this spare capacity to use
through sharing makes more sense, if this is as easy to do as it is with
SETI home, than letting it go to waste. Why do people not sell the
capacity instead? Probably, this would raise the transaction costs to
the point where it would not be worthwhile.
Moreover, via "peer-to-peer" systems, people exchange digital copies of
music over the internet, sharing not only songs but, more important, the
physical memory of their PCs. Tens of millions of people have used
peer-to-peer systems, which account for more than half of all internet
traffic. One reason why sharing is so commonplace is that there is
enormous overcapacity in both computer memory and internet bandwidth
(and because the songs themselves are "non-rivalrous"). Both memory and
bandwidth are rivalrous, yet people have no choice but to buy more than
they can usually consume themselves. And as with open source, sharing is
made easy because the internet has made transaction costs so low.
Tune in and share
The phenomenon of sharing physical goods has important implications for
a number of public policy debates today, most notably for regulation of
the use of radio spectrum. Around the world, regulators have granted
licences, giving mobile-phone companies the rights to use a specific
band of the airwaves, often in exchange for billions of dollars.
Spectrum is parcelled out in this way under the assumption that more
than one signal on the same frequency results in interference. This has
been true until recently, but today radios with cheap microprocessors
can pick out competing signals intelligently, just as the human ear can
make sense of a conversation in a noisy bar.
The result is that new technology has made the sharing of spectrum
possible - radio waves could be a non-rivalrous goodâ - if only this were
legally permitted and engineered into the software that runs the
wireless devices. Regulators have changed their approaches slightly by
allowing secondary markets in spectrum, but this anachronistically still
presumes exclusive, not shared, use.
Mr Benkler does not limit his analysis to computing and bandwidth, but
tries to make a broader point in favour of sharing goods far beyond
information technology. "Social sharing", he asserts, represents â "a
third mode of organising economic production, alongside markets and the
state." However, with the exception of carpooling, he acknowledges he is
hard-pressed to find instances where sustained sharing of valuable
things is prevalent in the world outside information technology. For
most goods and services, sharing will remain the exception not the rule.
But Mr Benkler has identified an intriguing alternative.
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