But information has always been a notoriously difficult commodity to deal with, and, in some ways, computers and high-speed networks make the problems of buying, selling, and distributing information goods worse rather than better. Technology for producing and distributing information is useless without some way to locate, filter, organize and summarize it. The evolution of the Internet itself poses serious problems. If interconnection standards are developed that make it cheap and easy to transmit information across independent networks, competition will flourish.
Similar problems arise at the level of the information goods themselves.
There is a growing need for open standards for formats used to represent text, images, video and other collections of data, so that one producer's data will be accessible to another's software. As with physical links, it is not yet clear how to make sure companies have the right economic incentives to negotiate widely usable standards. There are already more than a dozen proposals for ways to conduct secure financial transactions on the Internet. Even when the financial infrastructure becomes widely available, there is still the question of how digital commodities will be priced. Not one of these questions has a definitive answer, and it is likely that many market experiments will fail before viable solutions emerge.