What makes me most angry about all this is that the conflict is framed as being between "consumers" or "users" the anonymous masses expected to just passively d

What makes me most angry about all this is that the conflict is framed as being between "consumers" or "users" the anonymous masses expected to just passively download and experience "the content" and the "producers" the real contributors who fill their browsers with this oh so valuable "content". But that is not what the web should be about at all! Yes in any social gatherings there will be a large corpus of passive participants but we should never just bifurcate the community into consumers and producers because of that. Between the active and passive participants there's a large space of interesting levels of participation, the commentators, remixers, transducers, the ones keeping quiet until they don't and and so forth. The web should be about this large interactive space where people can exchange and collaborate in any chosen capacity. Not a distribution infrastructure of "content". So please forget any arguments about what "consumers want to consume" it just promotes this unproductive bifurcation.