The full quote:
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
That was said by Stewart Brand, something of a 1960s-era hippy-turned-businessman, to Steve Wozniak, of Apple Fame. Brand's previous ventures were the Whole Earth Catalog and Global Business Network. He went on to found the WELL, among the first online communities, and the Long Now Foundation.
The fundamental notion contrasts's informations high fixed costs with its low marginal costs, as well as the sometimes high use value.
For both psychological and economic reasons (marginal analysis), there's a strong incentive to keep information's price low. Much of the general conflict over content creators and consumers concerns this. Many economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, argue that information is a public good. See p. 308:
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
With copyright and printed media, an effictive moat and gate were created by which higher prices could be sustained for some goods (books, periodicals, record albums, film), as well as advertising-subsidised publiction (periodicals, broadcast).
Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909) gives a good run-down of the trade-offs in mass-market advertising-subsidised media vs. small-market, intellectual products. The same dynamics continue to apply.
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holt#page/4/mod...
There was a strong tradition, especially on the U.S. West Coast, of an open-access, technologically mediated information regime. Brand and John Perry Barlow ("Wine Without Bottles", "Cyberspace Manifesto") reflected much of this.
https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Unfortunately, this vision failed to address a few realities:
1. Changing the costs and prices of an activity fundamentally changes that activity. It wasn't just the then high-quality contributors who joined in the party, but kooks, crazies, terrorists, scammers, opportunists, etc., who had previously been priced out (or otherwise largely excluded).
2. As a medium grows in use and importance, it becomes ever more attractive to those who would seek to exploit it for personal, or political, gain. We're well into that phase of Internet use now. It's a history that's been pressaged by earlier major communications developments: cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, cinema, phonograph, public-address systems, printing, speech.
3. If it's possible to make money (or seek other non-didactic reward) through a medium, then that incentive will tend to drive out truth-seeking activities. Evolutionary systems are exceedingly good at evolving toward what is incentivised for, and extirpating competing forms.
I still subscribe to parts of the original concept: information really ought be fairly freely available, perhaps paid on a tax basis. But our epistemic systems should also be, substantially, guided by epistemological criteria.