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The expression “commodification” of information has been trendy. But what does it mean, exactly? It seems to be a broad umbrella that shelters various views, mostly critical, about information, media, and knowledge. It is used by the academic left[3] as well as the capitalist right. Microsoft’s leaked “Halloween memos” that featured in the government’s antitrust case against the company included the internal conclusion that it should “decommoditize protocols and applications” by “extending these protocols and developing these protocols[4] “ In other words, the company should seek a proprietary strategy, likely to involve the exercise and creation of market power, in order to prevent a commodification that lowers profitability. In a similar way, McKinsey consultants warns their business clients, in an article entitled Shedding the Commodity mind set that “with true commodities, you don’t get a price premium.”[5] Madison Avenue, too, bemoans commodification where advertising is bought in bulk without concern with the surrounding content.[6] Such commodification leads to advertisers viewing different publications as interchangeable, and the energy giant Enron, consequently, is considering to create a trading market for generic advertising space, including futures contracts, etc. Wall Street has concluded that long distance service has become commodified[7] and AT&T and MCI WorldCom have been dropped like hot potatoes.
In contrast, the usual scholarly assumption is that proprietary approaches to information are exactly what causes commodification by creating ownership and control relations in the information environment, making it unaffordable and under-supplied with respect to the poorer and weaker parts of the population. [8]