"How did online audiences and digital revenue get so concentrated? Is online oligopoly inevitable or is there a way out of the “internet trap”? These are the questions Matthew Hindman sets out to answer in his new book The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy. Many think of the internet as a cheap, sometimes even free, place to operate. Hindman shows that is a common misconception. The internet has not reduced the cost of reaching audiences — it has merely shifted who pays and how. [...] Even firms who want to limit their collection of data cannot do so — the way the digital economy works, that would be suicide in slow motion. Internet will not destroy democracy, or news, but human choices can and strengthening antitrust enforcement is key. But so is a deeper understanding of how the internet economy works. If we can better understand how our choices add and multiply together, we can make wiser decisions, and Hindman’s book is a great place to start."

"From the title of this book, the reader could well expect that it is yet another of these breathless condemnations of the internet. It is not. [...] The author demonstrates that, far from these optimistic claims, the market did not decentralize and in fact is dominated by large firms: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo!. [...] What the author does not do is give us a reason to care about bigness. Are large internet firms hurting customers, behaving anticompetitively, damaging markets? [...] On the plus side, (i) the author’s analysis of the decline of news media, the failure of current attempts to fix it, and what is likely to work better is first-rate; (ii) the author marshals extensive data to demonstrate his points; (iii) the book is well written and well documented. On the minus side, there is the author’s choice of problems: (i) much of the book is given over to demonstrating that the internet has evolved to be dominated by about a half-dozen large firms, much like the rest of the US economy. His reason for this focus is because this is not the outcome predicted by the internet gurus of the mid-1990s. It’s unlikely that readers of this journal will be terribly surprised by, or terribly interested in, this result. (ii) Another (well-documented) result presented in the book is the lack of online hyper-local news sources, which again, is included because this is not the outcome predicted. But the evidence suggests that the hyper-local news market is quite well served by print media, so there is little reason for concern."

"In The Internet Trap Hindman argues that we in fact live with two Inter-nets: the imagined Internet and the real Internet. [...] In the face of this distinction between the ambitions and rhetoric of the imagined Internet and the current situation, <emThe Internet Trap sets out to offer some explanation of the current online monopolies, the forces that maintain them and finally the extreme difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of dislodging them. [...] Applying principles of economic theory that might usually be considered more suited to 'real life' markets and industries, Hindman argues for understanding the Internet’s story as one of continuity rather than revolution and situates our current predicament in the wider context of media history."