The Internet Trap

Subtitled 'how the digital economy builds monopolies and undermines democracy', this book reinforces the arguments of other experts in the field with a considerable amount of data and analysis. We have become used to speaking about the attention economy and scarcity of attention in relation to information overload - here one gains a better understanding of the importance of 'stickiness' and concomitant inertia in building audiences for commercial exploitation. It turns out that there are significant economies of scale, and that Google spent $59.6 billion on research, development, facilities and equipment between 2003 and 2013. As the author shows, there is in fact no free audience, and it is very expensive to acquire one even if the content is subsequently freely distributed. A key factor is speed, even in terms of microseconds, which promotes stickiness and suppresses the wish to close the page and migrate elsewhere.

Personalisation has been a key driver of algorithms and recommendation systems, promoting lock-in and audience concentration. Indeed, the overall process has been one of concentration, especially in terms of advertising spend, which has drastically migrated away from print media – in 2000, US newspaper ad revenue was $65 billion, plunging to just $18 billion in 2016. The author has some useful advice on digital audiences and stickiness in terms of what has been shown to work: faster load times lead to higher traffic, content must be good in terms of update frequency, quality, quantity and variety; site design and layout are important, as are personalised content recommendation systems. The final chapter spells out the gap between the imagined Internet and the real one, for instance in terms of a thin spread of audiences as opposed to the reality of one third of web visits being to the top 10 firms; and only the larger sites can efficiently personalise ads and content. All this is driven by fierce competition for attention, which arguably makes it all the more important to be able to switch off and take a digital detox.