The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy

"This book reinforces the arguments of other experts in the field with a considerable amount of data and analysis."—Paradigm Explorer

“You may think you understand the internet, but chances are you don’t. It’s not what you thought, nor what you hoped. Read this book. Then make your friends read it, too.”—Michael J. Copps, former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission

“The Internet Trap is the sole book to explain why media firms are dying from a lack of web traffic, what this means for politics and the public—and what firms can do to fight back. It teems with elegant writing, shrewd insights, real-world examples, and wit. If news companies have a savior, it is Matthew Hindman.”—Kenneth Cukier, senior editor of The Economist and bestselling coauthor of Big Data

“Hindman’s book upends conventional understandings of the open internet, and does so with an engaging style and precise arguments that leave a reader both enlightened and entertained. The Internet Trap is the best book I’ve read all year.”—James T. Hamilton, author of Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism

“A powerful reminder of how frequently a fixation with an imagined internet we often idealize as decentralized distracts us from confronting the democratic and economic challenges and opportunities of the actually existing and often highly centralized real internet.”—Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford

“Hindman provides a much-needed corrective to naive but common visions of the internet as an egalitarian place where all voices can be heard. His important and provocative book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the attention economy actually works.”—James G. Webster, author of The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age