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This blog post is part of a series, looking at the public interest internet—the parts of the internet that don’t garner the headlines of Facebook or Google, but quietly provide public goods and useful services without requiring the scale or the business practices of the tech giants. Read our first two parts or our introduction.
Last time, we saw how much of the early internet’s content was created by its users—and subsequently purchased by tech companies. By capturing and monopolizing this early data, these companies were able to monetize and scale this work faster than the network of volunteers that first created it for use by everybody. It’s a pattern that has happened many times in the network’s history: call it the enclosure of the digital commons. Despite this familiar story, the older public interest internet has continued to survive side-by-side with the tech giants it spawned: unlikely and unwilling to pull in the big investment dollars that could lead to accelerated growth, but also tough enough to persist in its own ecosystem. Some of these projects you’ve heard of—Wikipedia, or the GNU free software project, for instance. Some, because they fill smaller niches and aren’t visible to the average Internet user, are less well-known. The public interest internet fills the spaces between tech giants like dark matter; invisibly holding the whole digital universe together.
Sometimes, the story of a project’s switch to the commercial model is better known than its continuing existence in the public interest space. The notorious example in our third post was the commercialization of the publicly-built CD Database (CDDB): when a commercial offshoo
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Read the original article: Organizing in the Public Interest: MusicBrainz