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Dvorak on Google and Wikipedia

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the looking-for-strings dept.

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.

1 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Google alrealy has a working profit model. by fm6 · · Score: 1, Redundant
    To get even more profits, of course. Publically-held companies tend to be under constant pressure to up their profits, no matter how profitable they are already. Investors don't care about past increases in "shareholder value" -- they always want more.

    It's a shortsighted attitude, of course, but pretty pervasive in today's business world. One reason Google dominates the search market is the short-sighted mismanagement of other search engines like Infoseek and Altavista, which got taken over by big companies that understood profit numbers, but knew nothing about the care and feeding of technology.

    Which is precisely why it took Google so long to go public. Page and Brin were perfectly willing to cash in, but not until they could do so without surrending policy control to outsiders. Hopefully that means that Google will continue to be a good citizen.

    Somebody has to point out that even if Google does try to make people pay for Wikipedia content, they can't prevent others from "forking" the site, since Wikipedia content is licensed by the GFDL. (Which is why there are so many lame "encyclopedia" sites that just mirror Wikipedia.) So the free version of Wikipedia will always survive in some form. And the unfree version would lose all the volunteer content creators.

    I've said it before: Dvorak's a pompous twit.