Okay, some information wants to be free.

Over at the Rough Type blog, the always probing and questioning Nick Carr has a brief and bitter retort to those who say that in the Internet Age, information wants to be free. In his post titled “Information wants to be free my ass,” he points out that we’re paying plenty of money for delivery systems, so why quibble over tossing in a few pennies for content. An excerpt:

“Never before in history have people paid as much for information as they do today.

Do the math. Sit down right now, and add up what you pay every month for: Internet service, Cable TV service, Cellular telephone service (voice, data, messaging), Landline telephone service, Satellite radio, Netflix, Wi-Fi hotspots, TiVO and other information services

So what’s the total? $100? $200? $300? $400? Gizmodo reports that monthly information subscriptions and fees can easily run to $500 or more nowadays. A lot of people today probably spend more on information than they spend on food.”

There’s a lot of truth to what Carr is saying, but he loses me somewhat with his follow-up argument:

“It’s a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labor, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered. We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit.”

No one is paying for cable TV for the wires but for the programs. We don’t begrudge the makers of the programs–their work is the attraction. And they receive part of the proceeds from the cable bill. If Carr is saying that the systems are getting too big a slice of the pie, that’s another argument. But content is what we love. Making that content available and navigable are also positives, but they are secondary ones to almost all of us. Perhaps cable TV is a bad point of debate for either Carr or I since its structure was in place before the Internet became the dominant medium, but Carr’s bone of contention may have more to do with self-appointed gurus pushing books than the rest of us. As the paradigm shift sorts itself out, we’ll pay for the content we want and need.