A Pigovian Tax On People’s Attention
▻https://hackernoon.com/a-pigovian-tax-on-peoples-attention-23e2c75eab63?source=rss----3a8144eab
Back in the late 1990s, the web looked pretty much like the Wild West; anyone could grab a piece of digital land, put a name on it and start catching the attention of millions of users at the time, with a very lean team of people.This is how it started when the Netscape team, after having released their browser, made it available to millions of people in, at the time, nascent web. Netscape later IPOed and made clear to the world, that the Web was much more than just a few computers connected.Ever since new entrants have learned to dominate the scene, yet, over the years one thing has become clear.The most important asset on the web is people’s attention. Thus, web companies learned how to grab it, manipulate it, until the Web became a meme machine.If there is one thing our brain is good (...)
#economics #attention-economy #negative-externality #pigovian-tax #facebook