With apologies for adding to the anxiety already permeating Wall Street, I now disclose my most acute concern: I am firmly convinced that in this great sweep of globalization, the position of America as a world leader will increasingly depend on its ability to handle the Internet.

The country’s competitive edge is firmly established in its creativity, technology, and knowledge-based endeavors. What if no one were willing to pay for these things?

For any good to be exported successfully, people have to be willing to pay for it. With the Internet burrowing into a growing number of activities, which many consumers are unwilling to pay for, music and news companies are seeing profits plummet. Can video production, stock analysis, advertising, and retailing, to name a few, be far behind?

The other day, I clicked onto a telephone directory site, only to find that the producers of the site had lost their minds and were now demanding payment for what was once a free inquiry. I immediately removed the address from my “favorites” list and went to Google for alternatives. There were plenty.

The instances of industries losing out to the Internet are many. Cases of businesses benefiting from online growth are few. The music industry is of course the poster child for Webicide (I think I’ve just made that word up, but I’ll go online later to check — for free). An industry that was the world’s leader in creating new musical acts and exporting music has been totally clobbered by the ability to download tunes.

The head of a leading British research firm, Claire Enders, was a presenter last week at a “Women in Business Conference” hosted by investment bank Rothschild in London. Ms. Enders, who shocked the world in 1996 by forecasting that the Internet would be deflationary, says: “The music industry is a terrible place to be. It failed to seize the initiative when digital distribution appeared and paid the price as file-sharing took off. … Record companies failed to understand how consumers wanted to buy and use music online and pushed subscription services that have never taken off.”

The consequence, Ms. Enders says, is that “physical music retail is in fast decline in the developed world (apart from Japan). The record industry top line is forecast to have declined by 10.8% between 2004 and 2007.” Her worrisome appraisal? “The record industry’s future wholesale and retail pricing is in the hands of Apple,” she says. Connecting the dots, Ms. Enders points out that Apple’s market cap has quadrupled since 2003.

The newspaper business is another obvious case in point, according to Ms. Enders. “You can see it in the results of organizations like the New York Times,” she says. “It’s truly dire.” Few news organizations have been able to create a profitable online alternative, though the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, priding themselves on unique content, perhaps, have stuck with the subscription model.

Good luck with that. Ms. Enders says conclusively: “No traditional consumer media companies have managed to make up revenue loss in legacy businesses through organic extensions.” Meaning that online advertising may be growing like Topsy, but the profitability of that growth doesn’t compare with traditional ad spending.

Ms. Enders sees the demise of newspapers as especially worrisome and attributes some of the decline to Google. “Google has no feeling for content,” she says. “They put the same value on professional journalism as on blogs. It’s a very frightening thing. They won’t be able to pay journalists in 10 years time, and the New York Times will be run as a charity.”

It’s not just large organizations that have been disadvantaged by the Internet’s Great Content Giveaway. The writers’ strike in Hollywood, which concerned the replay of old TV shows and movies online, brought into the open a concern of all content manufacturers. Web sites routinely appropriate product and graft it onto their own Internet offerings, without compensating the original creator.

This concern is shared by all who are paid to write for newspapers or magazines. Once your product is picked up on the Internet, you can watch it fly from site to site, adding to your exposure, but adding not a sou to your pocketbook. Writers, cartoonists, and film producers cannot live on clicks.

Obviously, this phenomenon would not matter so much except that the Internet’s penetration is increasing daily. In Britain, the world leader in online spending per capita, Internet advertising now accounts for 16% of total ad dollars spent and will soon, according to Ms. Enders, overtake the amount paid for TV time.

The British i-conomy last year increased 54% versus the prior year. Money spent online now accounts for 13% of the country’s GDP. An astonishing 57% of the households in the country have access to high-speed Internet, and on average the Brits spend 8.1 hours online a week. That’s up from 6.9 hours the year before, but still “far lower” than the amount of time spent watching television, according to Ms. Enders.

There’s no doubt that Internet surfing is a fast-growing activity, but cashing in on that expansion is not so easy. “The vast majority of new Internet sites and business models are built around the exploitation of third-party content with no revenue generation plan,” Ms. Enders says. This, in her view, leads inevitably to a devaluation of content.

There is another force at work that devalues published material. These days, anyone can start up a Web site and promote his own songs, videos, or writings. An economist would say that having the floodgates open via the Internet has caused the collapse of barriers to entry for “content” professions such as journalism. Inevitably, pay for such output should drop. He would probably believe firmly in such platitudes until he found his own writings appropriated without credit or remuneration on several random Web sites.

This is not a small problem. In the aggregate, it is a national problem. America, for better or worse (don’t ask the French), are the leaders in music, films, and news distribution. It needs, sooner rather than later, to figure out how profitability can be restored to these undertakings.

peek10021@aol.com