(A) In recent years, online news sites such as the ones at MSNBC and Yahoo! have designed a business model in which they collect stories from the online pages of newspapers and wire services such as the Associated Press (AP) and allow free access to the articles for visitors to their Web sites. The effect has been to decrease newspaper and wire service revenues and profits. As a result, newspapers and organizations such as the AP have begun to charge or discuss plans to charge visitors to access to their Web sites or to download their stories.

Most users of the news sites of both the newspapers and sites such as Yahoo! and MSN argue that they should not be charged for access to these companies’ Web sites.

Do you believe that access to news should be free? Is any given news story a free good or an economic good in the sense that economists use those terms?

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(B) Does the federal government face a scarcity constraint?