Zero Marginal Cost
Description
Before the advent of the internet and near infinite reproducibility, the key factor in organisation were the high transaction and coordination costs, necessating the organisation through hierarchies, and hierarchical corporations. The internet's zero marginal cost is an enormous factor for change, leading to distributed forms of organisation and peer to peer dynamics:
Eben Moglen on the marginal cost of reproducing information:
"The conversion to digital technology means that every work of utility or beauty, every computer program, every piece of music, every piece of visual or literary art, every piece of video, every useful piece of information--train schedule, university curriculum, map, chart--every piece of useful or beautiful information can be distributed to everybody at the same cost that it can be distributed to anybody. For the first time in human history, we face an economy in which the most important goods have zero marginal cost." (http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html)
Bob Frankston: "Imagine the economic impact of having zero marginal cost for communicating. We’ve long ago paid for the copper wires – we do we pay a premium every month forever just to use it as DSL vs letting the lines lie fallow. And once we’re paying for the data bits why do we pay extra if use them as voice bits." ... "We own wires in our homes and we do get the benefits of zero marginal cost and thus we went from dial-up speeds to gigabits while the price declined." -- http://frankston.com/public/?name=ZeroMarginalCost
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Related: Zero-profit_condition