Fubica pointed me to an interesting service today which I believe is an exciting exploration of business models that leverage commons-based peer production.

The service is FON, "a community of people making WiFi universal and free", accordingly to the website. The principle is that people buy a sharing-enabled router which has one secured channel (isolated from the owner's) that anyone participating in FON can use to access the Internet. This way, if you share some of your WiFi, you get access to other people's. An extra feature is that the resulting wireless network can be accessed by people not participating in FON, through a fee. The revenues of these accesses are shared between the FON company and the owner of the WiFi spot used.

What I find most exciting, however, is FON's business model. They are not the providers of the WiFi service themselves. Instead, they facilitate it by building the necessary technology (the WiFi routers) and provide an authority which eases access control, allocation of the exceeding resources (which always have a market potential) and billing.

However, I think what is new here is the type of the system and maybe the extent where this business model is being applied, and not the business model.

Looking at a bigger picture, providing enhanced governance for peer production systems is already being explored as a business model. After all, someone does profit from websites like digg and flickr. Thinking a bit more, money is spent to have Planetlab administrators running security among other aspects of the shared platform.

Considering these possibilities in a same framework opens some interesting questions: When is the service provided by an external (centralized?) entity necessary to enhance peer-production systems? How does introducing the economic valuation of the shared service affects the perception contributors have of the system and therefore their behavior? How sustainable is sharing in such conditions, as users start go game the system and try to profit from it?

An interesting story on The Economist about the myth that countries with wider spread of new technologies (in this case, broadband) should be more productive than the rest has a few interesting facts:

Paul David, an economist at Oxford University, has shown that electric power, introduced in the 1880s, did not immediately raise productivity. Not until the late 1920s—when around half of America's industrial machinery were finally powered by electricity—did efficiency finally climb.

In 1987 Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, famously said: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.' It was only in 2003 that The Economist felt comfortable boldly proclaiming: 'The 'productivity paradox' has been solved.'

Can the Japanese and Koreans (who finish at the top of OECD's charts) do something at 100Mb/s that the Americans, British and Germans (in the middle tier) can't at 20Mb/s? The idea that “bigger is better broadband” is orthodoxy, not economics. So is its corollary, the neo-Cartesian logic that goes: “Broadband ergo innovation.” But we have yet to see innovation happen at a high speed that couldn't happen at a slower one.

In short, though technology allows innovation, it does not imply it. Kind of obvious, after you realize it, but I think it allows for the interesting insight of understanding there are two ways for innovating, and one of them does not necessarily pass through evolving the infrastructure.