A similar situation exists today with the sating of appetites for illegal drugs. Perhaps because many such drugs impact on the basis of human emotional response, that is on the physiological foundation of trust, the struggle, much like the prohibition era in the United States, has religious overtones. A significant aspect of the parallel social ecosystem in this case is controlled by drug cartels that serve as brokers between producers of drugs or drug precursors in foreign countries (and to some degree within the United States) and drug users within the United States. As with alcohol, the economics of this middleman operation are interesting. The actual drug producers, the farmers that grow opium poppies for example, earn a modest living but most don’t appear to get rich, while the end users (addicts) are in a position of pricing inelasticity. For them, cost is not of overwhelming importance when one has to have a fix. As a consequence, the middlemen who convey drugs from the producers to the users occupy the position of very high profit margin businesses; buying a product according to its cost of production and selling it according to its value to a captive population with a physiological need for the product. This is, of course, the holy grail of virtually any business; a situation where product pricing is based on value to a consumer with an overwhelming need and the cost of production is determined by a commodity production environment. In the case of illegal drug trafficking, of course, large sums of money and manpower are devoted by law enforcement to interdict the supply chain, rendering the business subject to high risks as well as high rewards. The “credit bubble” of 2007 and 2008 confirmed that normal banking operations are also subject to the proper assessment of risk versus rewards. The bursting of the bubble is an illustration of the consequences of incorrect assessments.

Coming back to the concept of portals on the Internet, a number of specific Web sites have evolved as ubiquitous brokers positioned between producers and consumers of content. We can identify three central genres of such portals: search engines, product portals and service portals. At the time of this writing, the most significant of the search engine portals is Google, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in this space. Most of their revenue is generated from general and targeted advertising. Hence, the act of providing logical connectivity between producers and consumers of general content has become a content commodity in it own right. This connection content is dependent on a satisfactory experience on the part of the consumer seeking content. In other words, this Web site is able to extract a premium for the trust that consumers derive from its services.

While there are many successful product portals, perhaps the most iconic of the lot is the Amazon.com Web site. With its beginnings grounded as a bookseller, Amazon.com has subsequently expanded into a full range of product offerings. This Web site has very successfully implemented a multi-protocol stack model in its provision of content to the consumer. In particular, Amazon.com was perhaps the first large volume Web site to perfect a two stack interaction mechanism. One stack is purely information and financial transaction oriented. It enables the consumer, through a standard Web browser, to search for a desired book to purchase through a database on the Amazon.com Web site. Once a selection is made, the consumer can pay for the book through a variety of financial services mechanisms, the most common of which is a standard credit card. At the time of order placement, the consumer indicates the address to which the book is to be delivered. Completion of the order placement then triggers the book delivery process that makes use of a different protocol stack.

The deliver stack entails lower level protocols through which the book can be reliably delivered to the consumer’s indicated shipping address. The physical layer channel for this protocol stack is a courier service such as UPS. Amazon.com has designed the physical layout of their enterprise such that their book warehouse is adjacent to the hub for the courier service. This means that a book package is delivered to the distribution hub at an airport by surface truck and it is then

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Book available at Amazon (regular)