RE: Can an economy function on a social platform?

There was a related TED talk recently that I included in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 22, 2020, and also shared on LinkedIn.

It was Why you should get paid for your data, by Jennifer Zhu Scott. Here's what I wrote about it when I shared it on LinkedIn.

Interesting analogy. Jennifer Zhu Scott compares today's situation with online data to the communist economy during her childhood in China.

In China, everyone had a job, but no one was allowed to own things, and everyone was poor. Then, when they introduced private ownership it lifted 850 million people out of poverty.

Similarly, on the Internet, a few mega-corporations have seized ownership of data from billions of people.

She argues that If individuals are able to own our data, the wealth from that data will be more evenly distributed, and every single person would be able to set our own unique balance between profiting from the data and preserving our privacy.

Examples she gives of steps in the right direction include the Brave Browser and the DuckDuckGo search engine.

Also, she doesn't mention these, but Verizon launched another privacy-focused search engine recently, https://www.onesearch.com/, and if you go through presearch.org for your searches, you can also earn cryptocurrency income from them.