| > that is not a public good paid collectively via taxes. Keeping in mind that most things which are paid for in this way do not meet the economic definition of a "public good" and therefore could have been provided efficiently by private entities for profit. "News" is different. At its core, without external regulations, "information" is not rivalrous: If I know something, that does not preclude you from knowing it. If I make a decision based on that information, that does not preclude you from making other decisions using that information (in contrast, if I eat a particular apple, you cannot eat the same apple). Further, to the chagrin of many, "information", at its core, is not excludable in that there is always a way in which it can be transmitted which has frustrated and continues to frustrate many who seek to control it. "News" is different though. Because "news" is usually something that demands attention now. Human attention is a constrained resource both because time is limited and because of cognitive constraints. Therefore, if one wants to understand what to do with this piece of "news", one may not be ability to process the this other one. Further, one can be excluded from receiving "news": Sure, you may get to find out eventually, but only people who pay for X can get the "news" immediately in a digestable way etc. When private entities try to provide information people value, there will be a variety of them, competing, contradicting etc. When a non-accountable body is charged with providing information that all must receive with funds collected in a way that is unrelated to what people want from the information they receive, guess what will happen. |
Information in its various manifestations (from a song, to a painting, to an answer to a coding question, to a piece of knowledge about the universe, to news updates about states of the human world etc) requires some human effort to be generated but can then be 1) replicated indefinitely at practically zero cost and 2) modified, adapted, integrated, reused in infinite ways using algorithms, to the point of potentially wiping out any original signal in an ocean of digital noise
The impact of this inescapable reality is explosive for all sorts of economic and political assumptions that have dominated practically all our historical experience [0] I see not evidence whatsoever that we are (collectively) coming to terms with this dynamic so the immediate future will continue being "interesting".
The positive scenario is that the zero marginal cost society will somehow find ways to preserve humanistic principles: Find ways to refactor and control all this digital tech so that the focus is once again on humans, their welfare and truthful relations with other humans.
[0] information processing seems to have started with agricultural oligarchies etching cuneiform on stone to keep records of tax and loans