There have been innovative alternatives emerging in cyberspace over the last couple decades to challenge the traditional models of selling people “stuff” (in this case hardware and software) to facilitate their use of electronic media for information gathering, development, storage and distribution. Many of these new models have been challenges to “the Man”, that is the big global businesses (like Microsoft, Apple, AT&T, Verizon, etc) that have been dominate players in an information-industrial complex.

Shareware and freeware models like Linux, and for love-not-profit enterprises like Wikipedia are beginning to make significant inroads against for-profit computer operating system, encyclopedia and other business products.

But perhaps ironically, a more traditional 20th Century profit model applied to the facilitation of electronic information gathering, development, storage, distribution and commerce is powering the emergence of a new for-profit juggernaut that may be making the other traditional for-profit cyberspace companies and their profit-models obsolete. It certainly has positive ramifications for a more egalitarian access to the tools and benefits of the information age, but also possibly negative ramifications in terms of sheer size and concentration of power and money involved.

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