Information wants to be free—remember that old saw? Some truth to it, only it’s backwards. This isn’t an information economy—we’re drowning in that—it’s an attention economy. That’s what everybody’s vying for.

The flow of information it promotes is free in one respect only. The flow is expected to be freely admitted to all the spaces that its providers desire to transmit to. Otherwise there is nothing free about the information. Quite the contrary. Information and message flows are already, and will continue to be, priced to exact the highest revenues extractable.

You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.

Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market. (footnote 4: The original contributions were those of Hayek (1937 and 1945)).

Freedom and community are important. Gratis software is not worth such an effort, because price is usually not an ethical issue. Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.

You can understand why a system would seek information - but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?

If we are content with knowledge as a commodity, accessible only through a computerized bureaucracy, we can simply let companies provide it. But if we want to keep human knowledge open and freely available to humanity, we have to do the work to make it available that way. We have to write a free encyclopedia.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

The economic value of information offers no great mysteries in itself. It is easy to prove that one can always do better, whether as a producer or as a consumer, by basing decisions on a signal, provided the signal and the economic variables are not independently distributed. But this remark has an implication for economic decisions; the economic agent is willing to pay for information, for signals.

The right to information and right to freedom of expression are fundamental human rights and we'll stand by and defend those values... Knowledge is so fundamental to allowing us to make decisions that empower and fulfil us as individuals... The internet is increasingly a highly commercialised place where privacy is illusory, where platforms and information tend to be highly concentrated, where information is algorithmically presented to you with tremendous bias based on what it is you looked at last. The internet is no longer a free and open space.... Wikipedia is one of the remaining free and open spaces on the internet... What we stand for is not just Wikipedia, but the open ecosystem of free information across the world. The need for us to create information. The need for inquiry. The need for sharing. The need for transparency and accountability. The need for presentation and celebration of languages and cultures... If governments try to get us to take information down, we don't...

Clearly, information is of the utmost importance in making economic decisions, especially when it comes to securities or other assets whose value depends on events not yet known. Now the distribution of information cannot simply be taken as given. On the contrary, information can be acquired at some cost.

Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major-perhaps the major- stake in the world wide. It is conceivable the nation state will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor. A new field opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategies.

Information is not like money or any other commodity. The cracks that it can slip through are almost infinitely small, and it can be duplicated at almost zero cost. Soon information will be like air, like the weather, and as easy to control.

Information—its gathering, interpretation and storage—is the ultimate goal of all intelligent life.