Today it seems a moot point.
It certainly wasn't a fight on the scale of an Ali-Frazier bout, but for a while, back ten years ago, the Carr-Benkler Wager was a hotly disputed issue. As the brief Wikipedia entry on the wager tells it:
The Carr–Benkler wager between Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Carr concerned the question whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized systems.
Those were the days when Web 2.0 was one of the hottest buzz words; when Time Magazine chose us, the users of the web, as its
Person of the Year. There was good reason to agree with Yochai Benkler that in five years from then user generated content, the vast majority of it posted voluntarily and without the expectation of remuneration, would represent the bulk of all web content. Carr claimed that within those five years the dominant internet sites would find a way to monetize content, and thus the bulk of web content would be "price-incentivized".
Both Carr and Benkler claimed that they won the wager, and frankly a good case can be made for each of them. The web is certainly filled with voluntarily posted user content. But rather than being peer-produced it may be more accurate to call it peer-uploaded. A great deal of what gets posted on Facebook and Twitter, the primary platforms that caused Benkler to claim that he won the wager, rather than being "produced" by users is simply passed-on to those platforms and more often than not the original point of production is an established, and monetized, source. Without a doubt the vast majority of the billions of photographs uploaded to Facebook are "peer-produced", but those that actually get viewed by users outside of a small circle of the "producer's" friends originate predominately from "monetized" sources.
Today, however, it's difficult to feel that it makes a difference who won. Yes, there's user generated content galore, but most of the eyeballs are focused on marketed content. The wager was started about a year before the first iPhone hit the market, and probably neither Carr nor Benkler imagined how smartphone ubiquity would influence how we relate to web, or internet, content.
Things have changed. We'll call it a draw.
Go to: Gone and even well forgotten?, or
Go to: The tailless wooly internet behemoth.