The question then posed for a critical analysis of the political economy of new media is somewhat different than that outlined by Smythe. If the new "free lunch" is information organization, search, and retrieval (in addition to content), how are these influenced by the commercial imperatives that structure for-profit media industries? If the "free lunch" is always subordinated to the characteristics of the formal advertisements, what happens when the character of this free lunch shifts from content to information organization? The outlines of such a contemporary critique would include an interrogation of the ways i which the organizational schemes themselves reflect the overwhelming tendency of the "free lunch" to "reaffirm the status quo and retard change" (Smythe 1981, 39). This line of critique strikes me as a crucial one--the extension of the concerns of the critical political economy of the mass media into the digital realm. The role of organization is, in a sense, to impose a new form of scarcity upon the information glut of the Internet age. If, once upon a time, mass mediation imposed scarcity through the limitations of content and distribution, in the digital era, it imposes scarcity through the activity of organizing access to information--that is, determining which content will be prioritized for which users. [...]