Tech's future is Free. It's also about designing stuff in the U.S. and making it China. Those are just a couple of tidbits that "Long Tail" coiner Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine chatted about on Charlie Rose's talk show last night. (That guy from tech crunch was on too but he was so tense I had to turn it off.)

But Anderson was his usual concise self, even when he was talking up older concepts for today's Web, such as his latest take on the "free" economy. The topic happens to be the magazine's cover story.

Anderson takes the "Information wants to be free" argument a little further.

A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be "really special ... and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive." This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand's original aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.")