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Dvorak on Google and Wikipedia
cryptoluddite writes "PC Magazine has an article by John C. Dvorak expanding on the community discussion of Google's offer for free web hosting of Wikipedia. Those against the deal point out that Google may be planning to co-opt the encyclopedia as Googlepedia (by restricting access to the complete database). In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.' Should public domain information be free?" It's a pretty scary scenario painted, but one can hardly take a speech from 2001 as serious evidence these days. Update: 02/16 20:16 GMT by T : This story links inadvertently to the second page of the column; here's a link to the first page.
You were supposed to keep a low profile, now Jason is gonna whack you for sure.
Trust Your Technolust
I agree...somewhat. I think if we step back from this just a bit and look at what this really entails, we will see that it isn't such a horrible idea. For example, look at Napster, Real Rhapsody, etc and realize that all they are doing is charging a month fee for access to music content. If the service fee that google is suggesting included legal use of text, photos, video and music leveraged on a global scale, $20 seems a fair price.