Now that works - or can work - in an up economy. But in a recession driving hard towards a depression the ad market is collapsing, and taking many publications - and web services - with it. For now, social media companies are buying each other up to survive, but there's a limit to that kind of strategy. At a certain point, someone is going to have to make money or the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
Well before that point, however, some companies will start trying to reverse the trend of "free" web services and introduce pay-for-play plans. Then the question is will users put up with that. Or more to the point will they be able to afford putting up with that.
Probably not. Or at least not in large enough numbers to matter - given the vast profusion of web services vying for attention out there. At the same time, we may see the price of fast internet connections like DSL and cable modems start to rise to make up for losses in customers caused by the recession. All of this could change the open "wild west" nature of the web for a long time to come.
Unless other institutions step into the gap to take the place of corporations. There are certainly lots of non-profit entities producing lots of cool software and web services, but they need a way to survive too. This assuming that the government steps in and maybe starts to make the internet a public utility as it should have been all along.
And that's where unions could come in. The American labor movement should consider putting a lot of thought and then a lot of money into supporting the development of free software and non-coporate social media and web services. This will help us grow a significant labor sector on the web, and position unions to become a major force in telecom policy together with progressive non-profits like Free Press that are already trailblazing in that direction. Here I'm not just referring to policy that benefits members of a particular union, but rather policy that benefits all working families.
The benefits should be obvious. In exchange for helping to build a stronger non-corporate sector on the net, the labor movement will win huge amounts of good will from progressive techies and reach a potentially vast audience with ideas about fairness in the workplace and the need for wall-to-wall unionization in the U.S. in the bargain.
Or that's what I'm thinking this week. Communicate or Die viewers should let me know what they think about these ideas by leaving comments below.
p.s. - Apologies folks, it's been a while since my last post. One great thing about working for Prometheus is that we're busy and growing as the labor movement catching on to the advantages of building web sites on the Drupal content management system. The downside is that we've been so busy that I haven't had as much time for writing in the last few weeks as I'd like; so I'll try to step it up again now.
