I wonder if big, successful tech companies should be dipping into their pockets to fund internet training- not as charity, but as an investment. eBay, Facebook, Netflix and Google, for instance. Between those four, there must easily be an annual $100 in revenue from having an extra US person online.
So for them to invest $15 each in free classes for someone seems like a no-brainer. Plus it buys good PR and goodwill. Plus it's almost certainly tax deductible.
It is what governments are for, but given the current spectacular failures of government, quasi-monopolistic corporations that can afford it might as well take on some of their functions.
There's a tradition of plutocrats contributing in this way [1], and like the commenter said, it actually would help Google's business.
Plutocrats love building libraries because they get to put their name up top. But the cost of building a library is peanuts compared to the cost of running them properly. (Or should be).
I just want to mention as an extention to this thought bubble, a better phrasing would be "this is what small, local, regionally influenced and funded governments are for".
If boroughs and counties had more relevance in society they could easily do things like this if they feel it would be beneficial (IE, they are a rural community with little techie knowledge, so offer training and info sessions to the populace at the local library!)
Absolutely. But the idea of a collective action problem is that sometimes it isn’t in anyone’s interests to provide the service by themselves.
This can interact badly with some of the (contingent) ways we’ve come to practice capitalism.
Ideally, a government can act as an internalizing force that allows economic actors to step out of local maxima – bad Nash equilibriums where everyone knows how to fix problems but gets punished by the market/shareholders for taking initiative to fix them.
It doesn’t have to be a government that solves a CAP – it can be an industry standards body, for example – but when they deal with things like individuals and libraries, we tend to call them governments.
True and governments have the unique position to have a longer view that would ideally introduce a whole new range of potential outcomes that might not be rational at shorter timescales.
One problem we face now is that the time scale of government is being shortened to that of the corporation. Government shouldn't think quarterly or annually but in terms of decades and generations.
I think the Facebook profit per user (from the IPO prospectus) is only ~1$ and it seems likely that the potential users generated using your suggestion will be below average in terms of revenue generation.
So for them to invest $15 each in free classes for someone seems like a no-brainer. Plus it buys good PR and goodwill. Plus it's almost certainly tax deductible.