The Web Economy: Goods, Users, Models, and Policies

Being, Space, and Time on the Web

“…), and auditing for both users and regulators. For the Web to be a free and open innovation platform, it should be engineered as net neutral (Vafopoulos ), not fragmented (e.g., Yeung et al. ) and uncensored (Kroes ) space.…”

“…Public and private funding for independent institutions should sustain open and effective standards. Furthermore, it is of equal importance that regulatory policies acquire the right balance of market power and innovation, and favor Web‐based development (Vafopoulos and ; Vafopoulos, Gravvanis, and Platis ).…”

“…The digital facet is distinguished from the physical by five characteristics, namely: nonrivalry, infinite expansibility, discreteness, aspatiality, and recombination. The Web, as a distribution network, restricts nonrivalry and infinite expansibility but extends aspatiality, atemporality, and recombination (Vafopoulos ).…”

“…Their usual approach is to model human behavior by reconstructing users' memory and consciousness based on their visiting sessions. For the moment, a small number of mammoth companies control most of Web space and time, restricting governments to passive and repressive policies (Vafopoulos ). On the basis of their control of vast amounts of collected and processed user data, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple (to name only a few) act as gatekeepers of the online Web ecosystem.…”

“…Peer‐production communities are based on information‐sharing mechanisms so as to create public knowledge repositories and encapsulate communities' aggregated preferences and expectations. Peer production constitutes a new form of decentralized intercreativity outside the traditional market and price mechanisms by redefining two economic orthodoxies: diminishing marginal productivity and increasing returns to scale (Vafopoulos ).…”