OnTheCommons.org » When Web Communities Become Ghost Towns
When it comes to Internet software and websites, there is a lot of confusion about the meaning of the words “free” and “open.” “Free” can mean “no cost” or “politically and legally free.” In using the term “free software,” Richard Stallman famously distinguished between the two meanings in his immortal phrase, “free as in freedom, not free as in free beer.”
So…assuming that we are using this latter definition of “free,” is there a difference between “free” and “open”? Isn’t an open Internet the same as a (politically) “free” Internet?
Well, it depends. A lot of commercial ventures on the Web like to be as open as possible because it attracts more readers and viewers, which in turn boosts a website’s advertising revenue. In this scenario,open access = greater commercial prospectsl. But does openness mean that a site is (politically) free as well? Is an open website the same as a commons?
A recent article by Phoebe Connelly, Web Editor of The American Prospect, dives into this issue by looking at the demise of GeoCities, one of the earliest online communities. GeoCities, which started in 1994, was a crude version of blogging and social networking. The site made it easy for Internet users to build their own free (no-cost) websites, and it let people create their own user profiles and organize materials by topic categories. GeoCities was a community in which individuals could build their own personalized spaces…
Once the Internet applications got sophisticated enough to host all sorts of online social life, the question arose: Who owns the information, photos and other digital material placed on the platform? If the materials are all accessible and shareable, does that mean that the space is a commons?
No. I call such sites “faux commons.” The corporate host is in business to make money, and their terms of service are typically crafted to advance that goal. If the company goes bankrupt, or if it decides that it needs to impose new terms of service on its website users to enhance revenue, what then of the community? What happens to the shared resource?
The community is subservient to the company, and the company may own the content and can dictate how the site is run. Corporate spaces come with “terms of service” agreements that lay out the rules users must abide by and what control they agree to surrender in exchange for using the product…
