“App is the new Web.” What happens when the 25-year-old Internet meme “Information wants to be free” bangs up against the power, ease and financial promise of the app?

I’m usually pretty skeptical of claims of “x is the new y,” but the phrase came from a trusted source and linked to an interesting piece from On the Media featuring Michael Hirschorn talking more about his recent article in Atlantic about the future (end?) of information freedom.

IWTBF is credited to Stewart Brand, who made the observation at the first Hackers Conference in 1984:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The notion of information wanting to be free also changes depending on how you define “free.” Free as in “no cost,” or free as in “no boundaries?” Most of the Internet world chose the former definition on the way to the latter. Now, it seems, apps might offer a way for those companies to get paid for content again. Says Hirschhorn of the New York Times:

I think that The Times will be able to offer what is more a reading than a browsing experience through their apps. It’ll be a more organic multimedia experience. It’s something that feels like you should pay for it. And they will stop putting that content on the Web. They haven’t said that yet, but it’s pretty inevitable because otherwise what’s the point?

There is no point, if you’re the Times. Or any number of media companies that start salivating at the notion that readers will pony up cash for news and information. And Hirschorn more than hints at the image of Apple’s Steve Jobs and his squeaky-clean version of the Internet (in partnership with content producers) battling it out with Google’s approach to wrangling the Web’s chaos.

That’s a fine image, and it probably fairly describes the current landscape. But let’s take a bit longer view, say, 2012, and look at the vision laid out by Robert Scoble in TechCrunch, in which information silos break down into a seamless integration of location-awareness, consumer patters, social connections and spontaneity, an idea that highlights the middle of Brand’s statement and, in my opinion, the most important one: “The right information in the right place just changes your life.”

I’m not sure my life has been changed by an app yet, but I’m incredibly pleased with the idea that I can find nearby restaurants and know how they’re rated. Or make note of places that I want or need to visit and have a reminder in my pocket. None of this continues to get better, however, if information remains in proprietary silos. Maybe you’d get one app-reality on the iPhone and another in Android, each with their own officially-licensed database and user interface. Blah.

All of this may be more true of “produced” content than of We’re only beginning to address the potential of millions of tweets per hour, the 72 percent of bloggers who write for fun and the 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

The fact is that much of the really interesting and powerful information being leveraged in apps is created by users: Yelp reviews, Tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts (and recommendations) and more. I’d add that the issue of ownership of that data remains to play out.

I think the specific note here is that shared information wants to be shared. I don’t care whether my sister has a Blackberry, my friend an iPhone and myself an Android. If I click to share, I’d like all of them to be aware of it. If not, I (and most others) will look for some way to make it happen. Because one thing we all should have learned about disruptive technologies by now is that they, by definition, won’t favor the status quo.