[api]

Maybe so, or at least it's an interesting thought experiment.

I've thought for a while that the dominant business model of the web is for-profit piracy. I don't mean The Pirate Bay -- those are small time players and are not very profitable if at all. I mean Google, Facebook, etc.

To make that argument work you have to define piracy independently of whether or not it's illegal piracy. In this case we'd define for-profit piracy as the "indirect monetization of content you did not produce or license and in which you do not pay the producer."

Google monetized the entire web. They didn't create the content, but they sold ads on it. It's like having a radio station where you don't make the music, don't license the music, and don't even run the transmitter, but you get to present ads in-stream. Then on top of that you get to charge people for those ads while you are also monetizing them. It's brilliant.

That's not illegal (in this case), but it is perhaps a form of piracy. Google would have had no value had the web not been full of people dumping valuable information online.

Does this mean Google is a value extraction enterprise rather than a value creating one? I'm picking on Google but this applies to a whole lot of the web's business models. I think it's legitimate to question the economic justice of this. Again it's not illegal, but there are many things that are not illegal that are shady. Is the monetization of what began as an open gift culture shady?

Obviously Google's founders didn't think of it this way when they built Google, but one of the things social criticism does is to question what things really are or really become independent of their original intent.

The counter argument is that Google provided a valuable service that made the web more useful. That's undeniably true. But how much effort went into that vs. creating all the web's content? Does building a road to make it easier to reach someone's farm entitle you to 100% of the proceeds of their farm?

[Spooky23]

Your premise is backwards. Does your desire to be a farmer oblige society to build a road so you can get access to the market?

The the internet is a big stack of books in a room, Google is a librarian with a master index who organizes the data. Calling that piracy is a stretch of the term.

Actually, taking the thought experiment further, you could argue that book publishers are the real pirate, taking ideas and making themselves toll keepers.

[api]

Yes, that's a very valid counterpoint.

The problem being explored by this and other ideas is this: the Internet has massively increased our intellectual wealth, but for the vast majority this does not translate into any increase in physical wealth. If anything, the Internet may actually make it harder for many people to earn physical renumeration from intellectual activity.

Meanwhile the cost of the most necessary physical goods and services keeps rising. We've created a world where a person can be homeless yet have the combined knowledge of all of humanity available to them instantly. We've created an imaginary post-scarcity society online, but that's coming into stark conflict with the very real scarcity of the physical world in which it ultimately exists. Cyberspace is like the Egyptian afterlife: you go to heaven, but someone must guard and bring food to your Ka.

It's truly bizarre, a total inversion of the ancient world where almost everyone could live off the land yet the priests monopolized knowledge and literacy.