While prices go up, quality decays....
It seems to be a common rule of thumb nowdays that as products and services are going up in price, their quality is decaying. Note, for example, that the number of part time professors as US universities has increased from 40% to some 70%. This means that the time required to develop a good class, which is a result of teaching the same class over a number of cycles, is drastically reduced, just as college tuition has increased 40% in the last 7 years (2000-2007). Another example would be the transition from 'analog' to 'digital' video recorders, whereby the elimination of the 'tape' is hailed as a good thing. Videotapes are far better in terms of cost (low), quality of information (very high), and storage (sturdy) than any digital device that currently exists. Tapes are 'natural backups', which cannot be said for flash drives or cards which have to be erased because they have to be reused. In fact, while analog tapes used to record 8 hours on a single tape, you are lucky if today you can squeeze 1 full hour into one. Finally we have to note that a decade ago, registering a domain cost a few paltry dollars--around $10 per year. Now, the NIC address of .pr top level domain names are costing $1,000 for the mere benefit of registering, which is quite frankly a most undemocratic trend. So, while greed is returning as the common social paradigm, everybody who stands to benefit is keeping their mouth shut to see if they can get in on the pie before the truth of emerging frauds become known.