I hope that you’ve all been watching the terrific videos on “Economics of the Media” that Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have put together as part of their Marginal Revolution University online courses. They divide their media economics lessons into four groupings: (1) Basic economics of media; (2) Media bias; (3) Media and government; and (4) Media and economic development. Tyler and Alex asked Jerry Brito and me to contribute two videos on Net neutrality for the project. Jerry’s course offers an overview of Net neutrality as a general engineering principle. My video explores Net neutrality as a regulatory proposal and couches it in a broader discussion of network economics. Each video lasts approximately 6-7 minutes. Here they are:
Most of you have probably already seen this but Pingdom recently aggregated and posted some amazing stats about “Internet 2009 In Numbers.” Worth checking them all out, but here are some highlights:
1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; 18% increase in Internet users since previous year.
81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET & 7.8 million .ORG
234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.
90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009; 1.4 billion email users worldwide.
26 million blogs on the Internet.
27.3 million tweets on Twitter per day as of Nov 2009.
350 million people on Facebook; 50% of them log in every day; + 500,000 active Facebook applications.
4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009; 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
1 billion videos served by YouTube each day; 12.2 billion videos viewed per month; 924 million videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US as of Nov 2009; + the average Internet user in the US watches 182 online videos each month.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.