Platform
production, online platform Writely Digital Digital Online Model Cooperation content Platform production, online platform Wikipedia Digital Digital Online Model Cooperation content Platform production, online platform Table 7.3: Economic strategies in the Internet economy.
Profit
Gift economy and advertisements
Non-profit
Gift economy
The rise of the Internet economy has taken place in a societal situation that is characterized by the diffusion of eonomic logic into all spheres of society, which can be characterized as neoliberal capitalism. The privatization of formerly state-owned media sectors, such as telecommunications, television, and radio, is a symptom of this area. Capital is looking for new spheres and strategies of accumulation in order to avoid crisis. Manfred Knoche (2001) points out that there is not just an economization but a capitalization of media industries that is part of the capitalization of lifeworlds and society at large. Capitalization doesn’t only affect the traditional mass media such as print, radio, television, recording, and film, but also the Internet, which, first of all, is a sphere for the advertisement of commodities, for capital formation and accumulation, and for the reduction of transaction and communication costs of corporations. I have termed the different economic strategies according to trendsetting organizations. Don Tapscott argues that the digital economy—which he defines as “new economy based on the networking of human intelligence” (Tapscott 1996, xiii)—is made up of e-business communities—“networks of suppliers, distributors, commerce providers, and customers that execute substantial business communications and transactions via the Internet and other electronic media” (Tapscott 1999, xiii). The business models presented here are based on economic networking, but to speak of communities obscures the fact that they are first of all oriented on capital accumulation, which is a competitive process. It should be noted that these are not only profit-oriented organizations. Indeed, most accumulation strategies are accompanied by a nonproprietary version that contradicts the proprietary model and in which products and services are offered for free (without payment). The Internet economy is an antagonistic and contested space in which commodification and decommodification processes are present and contradict each other (Fleissner 2005). Decommodification technologies threaten to undercut the commodification of the Internet and hence the profit of “new economy” corporations. There is a commodified Internet economy and a noncommodified Internet economy. Only those aspects of the Internet economy that are nonprofit gifts, that just have use value and no exchange value, hence are provided without costs for the users and without selling advertisement space, can be considered as decommodified or noncommodified. Examples are file-sharing platforms, Wikipedia, Linux, and Indymedia. Commodified Internet spaces are always profit oriented, but the goods they provide are not necessarily exchange value and market oriented; in some cases (such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace, YouTube, Netscape), free goods or platforms are provided as gifts in order to drive up the number of users so that high advertisement rates can be charged in order to achieve profit. In other cases, digital or nondigital goods are sold with the help of the Internet (e.g., Amazon), or exchange of goods is 140