From Dirty To Transparent
Currently there are two viable business models on the net:
- Porting a successful offline business to the internet
- Napstering unfair offline businesses with the help of the internet
After their success the next business will be to reorganise our lives based on transparent governing structures.
From Real to Digital
Internet is the latest high impact technology in the history of human civilization. It has the same (or even better) impact as the invention of fire, the wheel, or electricity.
Moreover it creates a complete new digital world in sync with the existing biological life. Soon digital life will not be separable from your ordinary life.
Today many thinkers asserts the internet took over the offline world by making its users become more, compared to others just sitting offline.
Internet currently is the sum of all human knowledge. In the future will be the universe where all our digital alter egos will live their independent life and sync back to us.
Current Internet Business Models
Importing
As the internet is a new expanding universe it makes sense importing all existing, offline businesses to net.
| Offline business | On Internet by | Scenario |
|---|---|---|
| All information available | Google is the starting point of, the gateway to the net. All raw information uploaded made searchable. It is so ubiquitous like asking anyone for information in the offline world. | |
| Information catalogs (Yellow Pages) | Yahoo | Yahoo is structured information. There are many catalogs of digital things grouped to be more available. |
| The library | Amazon | Where you go for a book, a cd and even more. |
| The radio | Last.fm | Listening music from almost all existing genres and authors grouped in channels. |
| The encyclopedia | Wikipedia | Knowledge distilled into hyperlinked articles. |
| Agora, the market place | E-bay | Where you can buy and negociate for anything |
| Your phone book | Where you can find all your friends and talk to them. | |
| The Photo Album | Flickr | Where you put your photos and share with friends. |
| The Diary | Wordpress | Keeping your memoires, thoughts, wishes in one place. |
| TV | YouTube | Watch anything which is video/audiovisual. |
| Classifieds | Craigslist.org | A place to buy and sell any product, service, information using small ads and structured by theme. |
| Information bureau | Ask.com | Instead to pick up a phone ask online the same questions about everything. |
Anyone can find a working offline business and port it to the internet. This model is native — immediately understandable and acceptable by the public as an analogy to existing services in the real world.
This is the only one real business model available however there is a strong resistance on porting some businesses online due to those businesses unfair nature.
Napstering
A big advantage of the internet lies in its transparent power structure nature. Until now power was distributed vertically: only the top level cast was holding the complete information, lower level casts were dependent on higher levels because information shortage was forced on each level down.
Internet keeps all clear and transparent. Vertical structures were eliminated as information flows freely between these stacks and reveals their true nature.
The airline industry was ‘napstered’ by low cost airlines because of the internet. Ryanair realised selling airplane tickets is a dirty business. There were many brokers and stacks embedded between the airline company and the end user rising the price of each flight. Seeling all their tickets online low cost airlines eliminated the in-between levels.
The term Napstering comes from the first attempt in late ’90s to modernize an unfair business — the music industry. Now we face several other napsterings as they are all in progress:
| Business / Industry | The Dirt | Napstered by | The solution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telecommunication | They are practicing untransparent pricing. Every year in every country they are fined by huge anti-trust practices still they are one of the richest organisations on earth. | Skype, wi-fi hotspots | In the future all communication will be done via internet (a la Skype) and the network will be offered by user shared wi-fi networks spanning all around the globe. |
| Media and Advertising | They are telling us lies all the time. They have one aim to sell more and more products, or, sustain a political context. | Blogs, bloggers like you | The current financial crisis was in fact the crisis of the media and advertising. As offline press will soon die there will be only fair advertising and less manipulation. |
| Banking | Financial institutions introduced slavery. People live on credits, all their existential necessities are nothing more than a loan from a bank. They are not transparent at all ruling even governments and states, pushing the world order. | Microfinances, Muhammad Yunus | The distribution of money will be democratised. People will help each other to succeed without involving banks, these infinitely greedy institutions. |
| The State | It is a very sophisticated mechanism for keeping control over its citizens. | Open Source Communities, Debian | Since information is free there will be nothing to hide, nothing to protect citizens from. There won’t be need for control. |
From Digital to Real
Once all our life governing structures will be transparently moved to the internet a boost in human creativity and life quality will occur.
All best practices distilled during this transformation — from dirty to transparent — will stay as new governing principles upon us. These will turn into business models exporting what’s good on digital back to real.
