Hi, Omarish. The tragedy of the commons (economists call these situations "negative externalities") doesn't apply to Web 2.0 in my opinion. The tragedy of t

Hi, Omarish. The tragedy of the commons (economists call these situations "negative externalities") doesn't apply to Web 2.0 in my opinion. The tragedy of the commons stems from a basic cost/benefit calculation: in business, if something costs you more than you make, you either stop selling it or you go out of business. The basic problem of a negative externality is that while the profit accrues to an individual, the cost hidden from that individual and is borne by the community. So a non-viable activity continues to be performed, until the community goes bankrupt. (I.e., the field is depleted and cannot sustain sheep). Some argue that pollution falls into this category. (Note that this is not necessarily an argument for private ownership of everything: the principle problem is costs exceeding benefits, and those costs being hidden from producers so that their incentives are misaligned. Privatization is one way, but probably not the only way, to align incentives.) But in Web 2.0, there are no hidden costs that are depleting the overall store. Companies pay for their bandwidth, pay for their storage, etc. No costs are shifted to the community as near as I can tell. A better model for what you're talking about might be network effects - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effects