| The Internet: A new information economy?
To many observers, the Internet economy seems strange and even inconsistent. After paying a subscription fee to an Internet Access Provider (IAP), the user can surf from site to site without payment. He has free access to information which apparently costs nothing to produce. In most cases, this is essentially public information (official documents, academic papers, etc.), information that has been assembled on a voluntary basis (personal web pages), or information which, for the moment at least, is evading copyright law insofar as this type of regulation is not yet rigorously enforced on the Net.
In an attempt to explain the situation, it is often claimed that this is an embryo economy. It is argued that soon, a true market will develop, sites will generate income through usage-based tariffs and the quality of the information available will be improved; the Internet will then be a fully fledged market economy and will be worthy of economic modeling.
This article argues that the Web economy - which is, admittedly, currently unstable - will not grow into a conventional economy where access to information is paid for by subscriptions to sites, by usage-based tariffs or even by means of advertising alone (as for mass media). Far from being an anomaly, the organization which is being set up on the World Wide Web is a blueprint for tomorrow’s economy, which will increasingly be an economy based on information products.
The first part of this article will give a brief overview of the problems encountered by market economies when information products, whose production is governed by major economies of scale, come to represent a considerable proportion of the products traded.
The second part of this article deals more specifically with the Internet itself: the linking-up of all PC and data processing units allows markets to be extended beyond the jurisdiction of the traditional States. The Internet generates a high degree of fluidity in transactions whilst the information products cannot be effectively traded on a free market. The current dynamic of services on the Internet heralds what might be referred to as a market economy for information, i.e. an economy in which value is centered on the “production of demand” rather than on the production of the products themselves.
Part three of this article attempts to show how the above analysis allows the current evolution of activities on the Internet to be explained, particularly the significance of search engines and portals. Finally, there will be a brief reference to the effect of the Internet on the economy, the development of a new form of social relationship and the development of a “virtual culture”.
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