Despite the worries addressed by the article we read, I have complete faith in the internet's ability to not get sucked into corperate greed. Youtube has been under Google's control for quite a while now and the users have yet to truly suffer from it. Little to nothing has changed at all about the community. There are still hilarious memes. There are still TV shows and movies up on the site, despite the companies best efforts to get rid of them. It still feels like the users are in control and that's a good thing. I have a feeling that all the big companies are very careful about this factor and with good reason. Offline, if someone is dissatisfied with a product or service, there's usually not much they can do about it that doesn't involve spending a lot of time or money. Online, if a company loses the faith of it's users, they can jump ship to another website with different rules in seconds. They could even make their own website if no others seemed to fit what they wanted. This is precisely why I don't think the internet will ever lose it's "wild west" type of feel. In real life, the wild west got swallowed up because they ran out of space. You couldn't just run off and build a new town. On the internet, you can do just that! There are no space restrictions. The wild west lives on with every new site made.
It's impossible to kill the freelance, community feel of the internet because it's impossible to stop the freelancers and communities.
Now that that's taken care of, I think it's time to share something for that wonderful web community. It's a song by Weird Al called "Don't Download This Song", which he ironically released over the internet for free.
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