Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Following the disaster John Perry Barlow, a cyber-rights campaigner who’d lost 95 per cent of his money, drew the harsh conclusion: ‘The whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. This was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.’ And he pointed out where the debate might go next. ‘In the long term it’s going to be very good for the dot-communists.’

Wikipedia is the best example. Founded in 2001, the collaboratively written encyclopaedia has, at the time of writing, 26 million pages and 24 million people registered to contribute and edit – with about 12,000 people regularly editing and 140,000 people vaguely taking part.32
Wikipedia has 208 employees.33 The thousands who edit it do so for free. A user survey found 71 per cent of them do it because they like the idea of working for nothing, and 63 per cent because they believe information should be free.34 With 8.5 billion page views per month the Wikipedia site is the sixth most popular in the world – just above Amazon, the most successful e-commerce company on earth.35 By one estimate, if it were run as a commercial site, Wikipedia’s revenue could be $2.8 billion a year.36
Yet Wikipedia makes no profit. And in doing so it makes it almost impossible for anybody else to make a profit in the same space. Furthermore, it is one of the most valuable learning resources ever invented and has (so far) defied all attempts to censor, subvert, troll or sabotage it, because the power of tens of millions of human eyeballs is greater than any government, stalker, interest group or saboteur can match.

Economists like to demonstrate the archaic nature of command planning with mind-games like ‘imagine the Soviet Union tried to create Starbucks’. Now, here’s a more intriguing game: imagine if Amazon, Toyota or Boeing tried to create Wikipedia.