In the information industry, as in any commercial industry, the one that sets the price has the ultimate responsibility of directing attention, while focusing on minimizing costs and maximizing returns. Traditionally this role and the control it entailed belonged to the corporation. In recent years, the customer has realized the purchase power entailed to the individual's role and has evolved from the ultimate firm's target to a valuable mechanism of the overall distribution channel.



Today people exchange goods and information via alternative markets like the Internet, over special host-sites like e-Bay, or even through spam. This newly adopted reality regarding the emerging role of customer's control over the distribution process even for otherwise meaningless commodities, has added value to the process itself while eliminating cost related issues from the sender to the receiver. This challenging new category of exchange has created a new demand of capable consumer networks in order to host new needs and take over control from the otherwise powerful corporations. At the same time, the vast market of everyday Internet users has shifted the information distribution channel further, to the point where open systems are becoming a new trend and information is valued separately and over the actual product or service offered.

In the new agenda of the Department of State, another market shift has already created a new segment for the U.S. corporations, where the service in quest is that of cheap computer programming. Countries like China and India, of great economic importance for the U.S. national interests, have already assigned themselves as the new users and at the same time future developers of innovative technologies and some support that Iraq and Afghanistan will be soon able to export minds, not products. The interesting part is that these new markets, have already found willing buyers whose interests are directed by the same controlling power from which private corporations have benefited in the past. The United States offers the training to the gifted elite of these underdeveloped countries, whose minds will work later as inside agents for U.S. national interests. These brighter people will in turn educate others so as to continue to produce for the huge target markets of the developed world. This is an interesting outcome of a series of events. The country that sets this new network will be the one that will benefit the most, like in the case of the first-comer benefits of the Venice commercial era. New networks, outsourcing and national economic outcomes will foster this change and create a fertile ground upon which new emergences will take place.

These blurred boundaries between production, distribution and consumption have released a new dynamic principle that genuinely challenges present generations and contemporary markets. Since the issue remains maximization of profits and control, international relations are in the viewfinder of national attempts to decrease trade barriers and increase interconnection. The emerging network interdependencies, fostered by the major positive externalities that have been recognized by the industry's professionals, have created new systems of distribution where the seller is at the same time the buyer and the processor of the requested information. Consequently, the issue now remains which are the key market objectives of this emerging networked environment.