Hal Varian

The problem is the business model. All of these behaviors 1) are hostile to high-quality accessble content and 2) are fundamentally driven by advertising (or its failure). Information is a public good. This doesn't mean it costs nothing to produce (the contrary), but high-quality public information has a high positive externality to the common wealth (that is, the commonwealth), and is essential in a democratic society. Some see the solution as micropayments. I disagree strongly, see Nick Szabo, Clay Shirky, and Hal Varian as to why not. Superbundling might work, but the ultimate superbundle is a highly aggregated, means-based fee. Either a direct tax (income or wealth-indexed) or bundled into broadband services. The former strikes me as more equitable, the latter as more viable. The costs are low. A $100/year average fee per $30k in income, charged only among OECD nations, would cover all online advertising revenues. A $500/30k rate would cover the entire advertising industry. ($30k is chosen as roughly median OECD per capita income.) (Note: corrected from earlier figures which applied to worldwide population: $20/person and $100/person would cover everything, if paid by everyone, though I see an argument for progressivity applying the tax to developed nations.) The distortions, perverse incentives, inefficiencies, privacy invasions, security risks, and more, of the present model simply aren't worth it. HN's policy is that paywall-based stories are…

some related ideas from the intellectual kernel of Google, for you to improve on/steal from https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.html#SECTI… (I tend to think of the aether in which ads are transmitted as the public, uh, space)

Probably not. Hal Varian discussed this very issue in his 1990 paper, "Economic Incentives in Software Design" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/Software.pdf) See also: Microsoft Windows. Dear Guardian: please remember at least the recent past, OK? Otherwise, you'll be condemned to repeat it.

"Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains" -- Google's 2004 IPO Prospectus (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Courses/StratTech09/Lectures/G… Binding or not, it's a social contract, and it could mean the world if Google stands by it.

Pretty stupid move as companies could actually use this knowledge of consumer behavior to adjust their pricing and increase their profitability. See Bakos, Brynjolfsson and Lichtman (1998) http://digital.mit.edu/erik/sig.pdf and Varian (1994) http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/sharing.pdf

PDF and html versions available from: From http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html

His page at http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/ says he's retired from Cal and now at Google. I've bookmarked his page of academic papers. Unsurprisingly, since his getting affiliated with Google about 8 years ago, he's written on economics of Search: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html and on the Google Library Project. Sure wish he (or someone) would be funded to do an update of this (2000 pub date) study. I wonder what additional variables might need to be factored in by now.

In the economics world, tax incidence is a matter of serious study. There has been a decent amount of work on who actually pays oil taxes. Hal Varian (who later became Chief Economist at Google) wrote a good piece[1] summarizing the basics in 2000 for the New York Times. The summary: "A gasoline tax in a small country falls mostly on the residents of that country. The world price of oil is essentially independent of the taxing policies of most countries, since most countries consume only a small fraction of the amount of oil sold. "But the United States consumes a lot of oil -- almost a quarter of the world's production. That means it has considerable market power: its tax policies have a major impact on the world price of oil, and economic analysis suggests that in the long run, a significant part of a gasoline tax increase would end up being paid by the producers of oil, not the consumers." [1] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2000-10-19.…