In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world.Sharing is LegitimateAn in-depth ex...

Bitcoin is starting to come into its own as a digital currency, but the blockchain technology behind it could prove to be much more significant. This book takes you beyond the currency ("Blockchain 1.0") and smart contracts ("Blockchain 2.0") to demonstrate how the blockchain is in position to become the fifth disruptive computing paradigm after mainframes, PCs, the Internet, and mobile/social networking.Author Melanie Swan, Founder of the Institute for Blockchain Studies, explains...

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of ‘platform capitalism’.This book critically examines these new business forms, tra...

Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one's disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook's Instant Articles. The promise of connective platforms is that they offer personalized services and contribute to innovation and economic growth, while bypassing cumbersome institutional or industrial overhead. In The Platform Societ

“A fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition.”—Fast CompanyShoppers with a bargain-hunting impulse and internet access can find a universe of products at their fingertips. But is there a dark side to internet commerce? This thought-provoking exposé invites us to explore how sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching are changing the nature of market competitio...

Web3 may be the next big disrupter in business. Don't be caught unprepared.Blockchain and crypto aren't just for speculators anymore—they're the backbone of the rising decentralized internet. Web3 has the potential to rewrite the past decade's rules: monopolies may be shattered, the web could be remade, and an entirely new breed of products and services will likely emerge. Where does your business fit in? Web3: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review...

This comprehensive guide serves to illuminate the rise and development of FinTech in Sweden, with the Internet as the key underlying driver. The multiple case studies examine topics such as: the adoption of online banking in Sweden; the identification and classification of different FinTech categories; process innovation developments within the traditional banking industry; and the Venture Capital (VC) landscape in Sweden, as shown through interviews with VC representatives, mainly from Sw...

Big Data and Big Analytics are a big deal today. Big Data is playing a pivotal role in many companies' strategic decision-making. Companies are striving to acquire a 'data advantage' over rivals. Data-driven mergers are increasing. These data-driven business strategies and mergers raise significant implications for privacy, consumer protection and competition law. At the same time, European and United States' competition authorities are beginning to consider the implications of a data-driv...

A book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the online economyThe internet was supposed to fragment audiences and make media monopolies impossible. Instead, behemoths like Google and Facebook now dominate the time we spend online—and grab all the profits from the attention economy. The Internet Trap explains how this happened. This provocative and timely book sheds light on the stunning rise of the digital giants and the online struggles of...

We can hardly underestimate the importance of privacy in our data-driven world. Privacy breaches are not just about disclosing information. Personal data is used to profile and manipulate us - sometimes on such a large scale that it affects society as a whole. What can governments do to protect our privacy?In *The Governance of Privacy Hans de Bruijn first analyses the complexity of the governance challenge, using the metaphor of a journey. At the start, users have strong incentive...

Information technologies (IT) shape economic space, but we have no clear map of the cyber economy since the "digital revolution" began in the early 1970s.The Digital Economy offers an up-to-date, critical synthesis that links the various aspects of the digital or cyber economy from the perspective of real firms. A geographic approach emphasizes how IT has made businesses less dependent on locational constraints, and the tangible effects on places and regions are placed at ...

This book asks a simple question: are the tech giants monopolies? In the current environment of suspicion towards the major technology companies as a result of concerns about their power and influence, it has become commonplace to talk of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or Netflix as the modern day version of the 19th century trusts. In turn, the tech giants are vilified for a whole range of monopoly harms towards consumers, workers and even the democratic process. In the US an...