Concepts / Public goods

Public goods are non-rivalrous resources that no-one can be excluded from using. They are also known as social goods and collective goods. Oft-cited examples include street lighting, broadcast TV, knowledge, and the World Wide Web.

Non-proprietary social networking that is open to anyone is a public good. The resources needed to establish decentralized social (dsocial) networking may be a public good when the corresponding resources have open source / open design licenses.

Hart et al (2021) are optimistic for Web3 public goods:

Greater scale should mean greater good as valued by an increasingly wider set of people: the creation of positive externalities.

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