billboards and print ads. Renting advertising space in areas with a large availability of rooms, or in the publications that sit within them, just goes to show that to “belong anywhere” means being everywhere. The frustrated idealism stems from many of the founders, especially those close to the World Wide Web. They really did believe they were ushering in something that was free and equal, a virtual world that would be very much better and nobler than the real one. In many ways, they have been sadly disappointed, but that is another book. Suffice it to say that the internet is not free, and it is not equal. (They also thought it would be democratic: history has already shown that in the wrong hands it can be very undemocratic indeed. Look how it has been used to suborn elections or enable shadowy state actions; or how it can create an unreal bubble of misinformation. The Oxford Dictionaries declared 2016’s International Word of the Year to be “post-truth”, an idea brought to you by the internet.) As the internet grew, the idea that it might just be better if it had a funding model – in other words, if the user paid – was ideologically unacceptable. When traditional media moved towards digital, they compounded the issue by giving their premium analogue content away for free. Only slowly have users’ subscriptions been seen to be a necessary part of the model – and even now there are holdouts and deniers a-plenty. For the advertising industry, these are very important points, as it has had to step in and fund much of the internet. No Google search you perform is really “free”: it is paid for by advertising. How strange it is that it still seems free to so many people. In fact, Google makes an average $3.25 profit each year from every person on Earth. If you count only those of us who are connected, that figure jumps to $7.25. Google isn’t free. “…the internet that has emerged is riven by conflict. It can best be described as the combination of frustrated idealism and strongly vested interests.” The idealism of the commercial internet is a persistent gene, though, however misleading it may be. It has found full expression in the so-called Sharing Economy, a name that implies something essentially altruistic. I entirely fall on the side of those who recognize this as a piece of seductive re-framing that does not stand up to