Selling Their Souls

Posted at 2:03 pm on Thursday, February 16, 2006, in Uncategorized, and tagged tapper.

Jake Tapper asked his readers to opine on a variety of issues, and I chose to comment on the idea that “once-idealistic internet companies have sold their souls to the devil…“

I will try to tackle issue number three. The internet companies have had to sell their souls to validify their operations to their stockholders (and the powers that manipulate the markets). When the internet was supposed to be this free medium, and the future seemed so bright, the reality that there is no money in doing things for free took some time to soak in. (Hello rise and fall of Silicon Valley stocks.) As a result of being a publically-traded company (bravo Bechtel, you are still private), the company is no longer in the hands of the founder, but in the hands of a corporate-controlled, yet seemimgly invisible, entity that we all hate but hope to get rich from. In conclusion, you can not blame the companies (but we will) for changing its goals and practices to deliver results for a changing demand, but we should blame ourselves for demanding these services at no cost, or at least accept the fact that these Yahoo!s and Googles are just modern variations of Standard Oil.

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