The Attention Economy Goes to Court
How does human attention work, and who should have the right to capture it, direct it, and harvest it for the sake of profit or future investments in value-generating innovations? The Google antitrust trial has brought such questions to the fore, showing that they are both long overdue and a long way from being answered.
BERKELEY – The Google antitrust trial has finally shown just how much the world’s dominant search engine is willing – and able – to pay to be the default on smartphones and other devices: $26 billion in 2021 alone, $18 billion of which went to another tech giant, Apple. While Google has long tried to guard this number, it was always known to be large – and so it is.