“Free” has become ubiquitous in the digital age. It has been touted widely as the only mechanism which is a necessary condition or an iron law for providing digital products and services across the Internet. More exactly, there is an inexorable pressure upon price points on digital products whose marginal cost of production is minimal. So business models are cropping up and encouraging the consumers to chart an “Internet Consumer Bill of Rights”: the business models painfully and reluctantly argue that the consumers’ personal information is being exchanged to get these “free” products which can be monetized by advertisements and the like. However, these toutings and exclamations by the pundits of “Free” have adversely impacted many industries that have been forced to go along with it, absent any immediate choice in that matter. Read the rest of this entry →