Competition in the Digital Age
This essay first appeared at Vox EU on Nov 14, 2011. Since the appearance of Napster a dozen years ago, intellectual property rights have effectively been substantially weakened. Unfettered stealing has caused revenues to the recorded music industry to tumble by roughly a third. While this reversal has prompted academic chin-scratching over its cause, most …
Continue reading "Is the Sky Falling? The Quality of New Recorded Music since Napster"
So I was reading Felix Salmon's account of a debate here in Toronto between Paul Krugman and Larry Summers. I guess it was supposed to be an insider-outside type divide. I was struck by this passage. Summers also tried to defend inequality, at least in part, by saying that “suppose the United States had 30 …
It took a couple of weeks to read through Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs (it's 600 pages or 2 million Amazon Kindle pages). As pretty much everyone has said, it is a gripping read and I, for one, cannot recommend it enough. But you should be warned. It is not a traditional biography but …
The National Telecommunications Information Administration just published the findings from its latest survey about Internet use within US households. In case you missed it, here is a summary: broadband adoption among US households went up, but not by much. Actually, that is not entirely fair. Viewed at short intervals, broadband adoption will appear to be …
Early Sunday morning, the clocks in North America moved back one hour. This time around we didn't know it was coming and actually hardly noticed when it did. So few of our clocks are disconnected from the Internet, that this change can almost occur without us noticing. It is surely only a matter of time …
This morning, I discussed Race Against the Machine with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and rest of MSNBC's Morning Joe gang at 30 Rock. Here's the video. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
In today's NYT, Paul Krugman highlights the subsidy being given to the 'fracking' methods of fossil fuel extraction: basically, another example where costs are socialized although, let's face it, the most common example. The story of an old technology using non-market means to keep itself afloat is, of course, the way things work. (Just travel …
I'm presenting today at the Annual FTC Microeconomics workshop. Here is the agenda for that conference. You'll note the disproportionate representation by faculty members here at the Department of Strategic Management at Rotman. My topic is on "The Impact of the Internet on Advertising Markets for News Media" based on my work with Susan Athey …
http://s.marketwatch.com/media/swf/main.swf Have we reached a technological plateau or is innovation still going strong? If you've read my book with Andy McAfee, you know where I stand. David Wessel of the WSJ discusses the pros and cons of the argument and ties it to our current economic woes in this five minute video.
Dropbox is the simple file syncing service that has grown, in just a few years, to 50 million active users. 96% of those users do not give a cent to Dropbox. The remaining 4% pay for more storage and purportedly make it profitable; this percentage is growing every day. I use Dropbox because of its simplicity, …
Digitopoly 