Comment by Intralexical

> I would 100% be fine with there being a world library that strives to provide access to any and all information for free, while also aiming to find a fair way to compensate ip owners… technology has removed most of the technical limitations to making this a reality AND I think the net benefit to humanity would be vastly superior to the cartel approach we see today.

I can't help but wonder if this isn't actually true. As you've noted, if there's a system where it's 100% free to access and share information, then it's also 100% free to abuse such a system to the point of ruining it.

It seems the biggest limitations aren't actually whether such a system can technically be built, but whether it can be economically sustainable. The effect of technology removing too many barriers at once is actually to create economic incentives that make such a system impossible, rather than enabling such a system to be built.

Maybe there's an optimal amount level of information propagation that maximizes useful availability without shifting the equilibrium towards bots and spam, but we've gone past it. Arguably, large public libraries were just as close to that as using the Internet as a virtual library, I think.

I've explored this elsewhere through an evolutionary lens. When the genetic/memetic reproduction rate is too high, evolution creates r-strategists— Spamming lots of low-quality offspring/ideas that cannibalize each other, because it doesn't cost anything to do so. Adding limits actually results in K-strategists, incentivizing cooperation and investment in high-quality offspring/ideas because each one is worth more.