To Pay or Not To Pay ?

Some very good points made over at Shirky's blog about consumer (non)payment of media. Will be interesting how the battle between the to pay and not to pay camps (Godin vs. Murdoch) plays out. Maybe even Freemium will prevail?

Worth a read, here. Here's a taste:

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. . .

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

This ties in nicely with the ongoing debate about the tabehoodai (all-you-can-eat) media plans raging over the web. Looks like supply-side sentiment is crystallising into action with the tariff shifts against the consumer.