§ 7 — Chronicle

Newsfeed

A running chronicle of the regulation, research, and critique bearing on the extraction of digital time. We collect, we annotate, we link out. We do not editorialise where the source speaks for itself.

Twice weekly · Mon & Thu Updated 11 August 2026

September 2026

6 entries

05 Sep 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

The intermediaries’ cut went from 15% to 51% — and the remedy is sealed

Cory Doctorow’s reading of the Brinkema remedy, which requires Google to sell no part of its ad-tech stack and which stays under seal for roughly two weeks, so nobody yet knows what it actually demands. He walks the three-part stack — sell-side platform, demand-side platform, exchange — and argues that owning all three while also acting as advertiser and publisher produces a conflict no behavioural rule can reach: the same firm represents the buyer, the seller and the house. The figure to carry: the intermediaries’ share of ad-industry revenue rose from around 15% before Google and Facebook took 80% of display advertising, to 51% today, moving hundreds of billions of dollars away from publishers and advertisers. He notes a bill to end the arrangement co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, and calls Google a thrice-convicted monopolist.

Why we logged it. This is the tax stated as a percentage. Fifty-one pence of every pound spent to reach a person’s attention never reaches anyone who made anything — it is taken in transit, by firms the person has never heard of, in an auction that closes before the page finishes loading. Read it against the ruling itself, logged below. Caveat: this is commentary, not reporting, and the sealed remedy may yet be more demanding than its critics expect.

05 Sep 2026

Research·TVision (via PPC Land)

Nine attentive minutes out of two hundred

TVision’s Ad Scoreboard 2.0, announced 25 August, puts a number on the thing the whole market is priced against. Of more than 200 minutes of daily video consumption, roughly 24 minutes represent advertising opportunity — and about nine minutes qualify as attentive advertising time. That is approximately one attentive advertising minute for every 22 minutes of viewing, under five percent of the total. The method is observational rather than modelled: a panel of 5,000 US households fitted with computer-vision sensors, automatic content recognition and digital meters, capturing four variables every second, including who is in the room and at what level of attention. Set beside the Video Advertising Bureau’s finding that video occupies 51% of American leisure time for a fourth straight year — 2 hours 37 minutes daily out of a 5 hour 10 minute total — it gives the extraction a denominator.

Why we logged it. An industry that sells attention has now measured how little of it it actually gets, and published the number. Two hundred minutes of a life go in; nine minutes of watched advertising come out; the whole apparatus of surveillance, auction and intermediation is built to harvest that sliver. Caveats, and they are serious: this is vendor research, not peer-reviewed; TVision was bought by the demand-side platform Viant in May 2026 for $40 million, so a measurement panel owned by a buyer is supplying the data its own buyers cite; and the release gave no measurement window, no demographic breakdown, no MRC accreditation and no statement of whether the nine-minute figure comes from the panel or a third party.

05 Sep 2026

Regulation·PPC Land

Four authorities looked at the ad auction in six days. Nobody had to sell anything.

A week-in-review that assembles four separate decisions into a single pattern. A federal judge in Virginia found on 2 September that Google had illegally monopolised two advertising markets, then declined to take either away, ordering instead that the auction be run differently. The European Commission fined Alphabet €460 million for ranking its own services first, and gave it sixty days to change the ranking rather than the ownership. The FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon on 31 August over what advertisers were told about a pricing rule, not over the fact that Amazon runs the auction, sells the inventory and reports the results. The General Court in Luxembourg confirmed on 2 September that a browser shipped with Windows need not offer a choice screen, because it is not used enough. Meanwhile the independent demand-side platform that spent a decade arguing it could compound against the walled gardens cut about 575 people, roughly 15% of staff.

Why we logged it. The author’s own line is the one worth keeping: nobody had to sell anything, everybody has to explain something. Four regulators, four jurisdictions, one week, and in every case the remedy landed on conduct and disclosure while ownership of the auction stayed exactly where it was. This is what it looks like when a system is willing to name an extraction and unwilling to stop it. Caveat: trade press aggregating four rulings, each of which deserves its own reading — the €460 million fine in particular is a self-preferencing case, not an ad-tech one.

04 Sep 2026

Research·JAMA Health Forum

Health warnings on social media work — and the framing that works is the one platforms will never choose

A randomised clinical trial with 1,012 teenagers and young adults, run by researchers at Stanford and UNC Chapel Hill, tested whether warnings displayed on social media discourage people from wanting to use it. They do, relative to a neutral control message. More usefully, warnings that named health harms — depression, anxiety — outperformed a warning that only suggested taking a screen-time break without saying why. Open access; DOI 10.1001/jamahealthforum.2026.3014.

Why we logged it. Tobacco took decades to arrive at the label. This is the first properly powered test of the same instrument pointed at an attention product, and it finds that the honest framing is the effective one. It also draws the obvious line: a disclosure regime that lets a platform choose its own wording will get the screen-time-break version, which is the version that does not work. Caveat, and it matters: the outcome measured is stated intention to use, not measured use. Nobody has yet shown a warning label reducing time actually spent.

03 Sep 2026

Regulation·CalPrivacy

California puts a price on a registry error: $200 a day

CalPrivacy’s Enforcement Advisory 2026-01 states that data brokers filing incorrect information in their annual Delete Act registration are liable for a $200 fine for every day the information stays wrong, and notes the Enforcement Division has already brought multiple actions over reporting errors. Executive director Tom Kemp ties this directly to the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform: DROP only functions if brokers report their activities accurately, so an inaccurate registration is not a paperwork failure but a deletion right that silently does not work. The agency brought a separate action against Virginia broker SalesIntel Research earlier the same week, one of more than a dozen against unregistered brokers.

Why we logged it. A regulator that has stopped asking and started metering. The interesting move is not the size of the fine but its shape — per day, per error, accruing without an enforcement action having to be brought first. That is the structural form a Conversion Dividend would need: a continuously running obligation rather than a periodic settlement. Caveat: this is an advisory setting out the Enforcement Division’s reading of an existing statute, not a rulemaking or a decision, and it reaches registration accuracy only — not what brokers do with the data.

02 Sep 2026

Regulation·AdExchanger

The monopoly was proven, and then left standing

US District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who found in April 2025 that Google illegally monopolised the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets, has ruled on the remedy — and rejected the Department of Justice’s proposal that Google divest its sell-side AdX exchange. Instead she ordered most of the parties’ proposed behavioural remedies: making AdX real-time bid amounts available to rival ad servers, deprecating the Unified Pricing Rules so publishers can set different price floors for individual bidders, and abandoning the “first look” and “last look” privileges Google says it stopped using years ago. Both sides must file a jointly proposed final judgment within 30 days. It reads as a near-mirror of Judge Mehta’s search ruling, which also found monopoly and also declined divestiture.

Why we logged it. AdX is the exchange where, in the milliseconds after a page loads, a moment of someone’s notice is auctioned. A court has now established twice that the house rigged that auction in its own favour, and then decided the market is too entangled to unwind. The through-line worth naming: proving the extraction is the easy part. Stopping it is the part the system will not do. Caveats: the full ruling was not public at the time of reporting, the behavioural remedies are not final until the joint judgment is filed, and Google continues to contest the underlying liability finding on appeal.

August 2026

14 entries

31 Aug 2026

Regulation·FTC and 22 states

The FTC sues Amazon over a hidden ad "surcharge" — and the word the company chose to bury it

The Federal Trade Commission and 22 state attorneys general filed a 181-page complaint (Case 2:26-cv-03097, W.D. Wash.) alleging that from 2018-2019 Amazon ran a second-price ad auction, computed the price it would produce, then overrode it with an undisclosed "soft reserve" capped only by the advertiser's own winning bid — while telling some 1.2 million advertisers, most of them small businesses, that winners pay "one penny more than" the runner-up. Internal reports cited in the filing show the share of clicks charged at the advertiser's full bid rising from 4% in late 2020 to 79.1% in 2024. When staff needed a word for the charge, they were told to stop calling it a "surcharge," asked ChatGPT for alternatives, weighed "profit extraction lever" — and settled on "performance premium." Amazon rejects the case, arguing inflation-adjusted cost-per-click stayed flat and that its relevance weighting saved advertisers more than $8 billion.

Why we logged it. The extraction and the euphemism in a single document: a marketplace inserting a hidden charge after the auction has closed, then hunting for language to keep anyone from naming it. This is the attention tax at the point of sale, and the internal record of a company that knew exactly what it was doing. Caveat: an unproven complaint, with much of the sizing arithmetic redacted; Amazon's counter-measurement compares its auction against a bid-only baseline rather than the second-price figure its own training materials promised.

27 Aug 2026

Critique·CPJ & Harvard's Carr-Ryan Center

The advertising machine is a surveillance machine — and journalists are the test case

The Committee to Protect Journalists, with the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, documents how the roughly $1 trillion online-advertising ecosystem doubles as mass-surveillance infrastructure. Software development kits embedded in apps harvest location data; real-time bidding auctions broadcast a user's data to every potential bidder whether or not anyone buys the ad; and because that data is resold after it leaves the device, it becomes near-impossible to know when someone has been tracked. The concrete illustration: New York Times reporters were able to trace a Washington Post journalist using SDK location data drawn from more than 12 million phones. A companion guide sets out defensive measures.

Why we logged it. The machinery built to auction attention is the same machinery that surveils — not two systems but one, here turned on the people whose job is to watch power. It is the clearest recent statement that the ad exchange and the tracking apparatus are the same object. Caveat: the report's risk scenarios are drawn from journalists and human-rights defenders specifically; the ad-tech mechanics it describes are general.

21 Aug 2026

Regulation·California Legislature

California's surveillance-pricing ban reaches the Senate floor

On 21 August, AB 2564 was read a third time and amended in the California Senate, moving toward a floor vote before the legislative session closes on 31 August. The bill would prohibit "surveillance pricing" — a customised price for a consumer or group "based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance technology" and determined through statistical modelling, data analytics or AI — and it also reaches random price variation shown to different online shoppers. It is framed as furthering the California Privacy Rights Act. Business opposition is organised: the California Chamber of Commerce ran a "myths vs facts" rebuttal on 5 August.

Why we logged it. The same dossiers that decide what you see now set what you pay — a legislature deciding whether a price built from your surveilled data is lawful at all. It picks up the AB 2564 thread we logged in July at the point it reaches the Senate floor. Caveat: a state bill still in progress, not a law; a grocery-and-retail pricing measure, and a pass, amendment or failure could all still happen before month's end.

19 Aug 2026

Regulation·FTC (via Consumer Finance Monitor)

The FTC puts surveillance pricing on notice — as a third state bans it outright

On 19 August the FTC issued for public comment a Proposed Enforcement Policy Statement Regarding Personalized Pricing, warning that a business using consumers’ personal data to set individualised prices without adequate disclosure may violate Section 5 of the FTC Act. It is the first federal move to meet the state wave this feed has tracked through Connecticut’s disclosure-label law: New Jersey has now become the third state to ban surveillance pricing for groceries outright, after Maryland (first, April 2026) and Connecticut, while New York took the disclosure route. Congressional oversight runs in parallel — a House Oversight AI-pricing inquiry opened in March, an Energy and Commerce grocery inquiry in May — and California AG Bonta’s January investigative sweep continues.

Why we logged it. The same argument this site makes about attention, arriving at the checkout: value a company extracts by watching a person is turned back on that person as a higher price, and the federal consumer regulator has now said, provisionally, that doing so silently may be unlawful. Note what it does not say — that doing it openly is fine. Caveats: a proposal out for comment, not a rule or an action; it targets non-disclosure rather than the practice; and most state bills remain unpassed and contested.

18 Aug 2026

Critique·OpenAI

Advertising moves inside the chatbot — ChatGPT Ads goes international

OpenAI confirmed on 11 August that ChatGPT Ads has launched in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea, and on 18 August that it is expanding across Europe — the rapid internationalisation of a US test that only began in February 2026. Ads run for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go tiers and, by OpenAI's own account, are matched using "the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads." OpenAI stresses that answers stay independent, that advertisers receive only aggregate performance data, and that personalisation is user-controllable (and, in the EU, consent-gated).

Why we logged it. The surveillance-advertising model — attention captured, profiled and sold — is now being rebuilt inside the conversational interface hundreds of millions of people increasingly use in place of search, a surface with far more intimate signal than a feed. The tax follows the attention wherever it goes. Caveat: the company's own framing of a product still in test; it is evidence of the model's expansion, not of a specific abuse. Read it alongside the independent audit logged below.

17 Aug 2026

Research·Pediatric Exercise Science

More childhood screen time, better cognitive processing — a result we are logging against ourselves

An eight-year follow-up of Finland’s PANIC study (124 girls, 136 boys, average age 15.8) found that greater screen time accumulated from childhood was associated with better cognitive processing in adolescence on the CogState battery — a result the researchers themselves flag as cutting against common assumptions. Their reading is that what a child does on a screen (problem-solving, creativity, active thinking) may matter more than how long the screen is lit, and that the aim is balance between physical activity and mentally engaging screen use rather than minimisation. DOI 10.1123/pes.2025-0083.

Why we logged it. We are logging this because it disagrees with us. Read against the Millennium Cohort study logged this month, it makes the point better than either does alone: “screen time” is the wrong unit. Our quarrel is with engineered compulsion — products built so that leaving is harder than staying — not with minutes in front of a display, and an honest ledger keeps that distinction sharp. Caveats the authors stress: small sample, associational not causal, sex-dependent and mixed physical-activity results, and an explicit call for intervention studies before anyone infers cause.

12 Aug 2026

Critique·404 Media

A searchable map of the advertising surveillance pipeline

DecryptAds, built by Zach Edwards and reported by Joseph Cox, aggregates three types of file the ad industry publishes for anti-fraud compliance — ads.txt, app-ads.txt and sellers.json — into the largest publicly searchable corpus of advertising supply-chain data yet assembled, roughly 284 million records at launch. Its purpose is to make legible the pipeline by which real-time bidding turns an ordinary app open into a surveillance record. The mechanism is the one this site keeps returning to: when an auction fires, the bid request — device ID, precise GPS, browsing profile, app in use — is broadcast to every potential bidder before anyone wins, and nothing requires the losers to delete it. A DHS document obtained under FOIA is, per the report, the first time a federal agency explicitly acknowledged buying RTB-sourced location data: a CBP pilot from 2019–2021 drawing on SDKs in tens of thousands of apps. Wider context here.

Why we logged it. The extraction of attention and the surveillance of a person are not two systems. They are one auction. A firm can join real-time bidding not to buy ads but to collect the data every participant receives by design, sell it to a broker, and let the broker sell it to the state — and until now there was no way for an outsider to trace the chain. Caveats: much of the framing is about Fourth Amendment law rather than the advertising economics we foreground; the tool maps the supply chain, it does not by itself prove any specific broker sold to any specific agency.

11 Aug 2026

Regulation·Connecticut (SB 4)

Surveillance pricing arrives at the checkout with a warning label

From 1 October, Connecticut's SB 4 bars retail sellers and third-party delivery services from setting customised prices on personal data — and requires any other business using a "price setting device" to display the words "THIS PRICE WAS INCREASED BY A PRICE SETTING DEVICE USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA." It is one route among many: more than 60 pricing bills are moving across some 33 states, with Maryland the first to flatly prohibit the practice. Enforcement is widening beyond the statutes — California's Attorney General has opened an investigative sweep treating surveillance pricing as a purpose-limitation violation of the CCPA, on the theory that data handed over for one purpose cannot be repurposed to decide what a person pays. The bills are drafted to close the obvious escape: pricing a behavioural "group" still counts.

Why we logged it. The value extracted by watching a person, turned back on them at the till — and at least one state now forces that transfer to announce itself on the price tag. It carries forward the California AB 2564 thread from a jurisdiction that has already enacted. Caveat: this is Connecticut specifically; most of the 60-plus bills are unpassed, and business groups are contesting both the disclosure and prohibition models. AG enforcement of SB 4 begins 1 July 2027.

07 Aug 2026

Research·arXiv

Auctioning attention on social networks

The paper proposes building a social feed as an auction — users bid for one another's attention — with a mechanism that weighs producers, consumers, the platform operator and social welfare, in place of a recommender that ranks for engagement alone. On real and synthetic networks it reports higher "producer welfare" (36.3% and 31.4%) and, more to the point, "consistently more equitable distributions of attention" than the algorithmic baselines. Authors Andy Lee and Hari Sundaram state the status quo plainly: producers optimise for the algorithm, consumers absorb the externalities — polarisation, misinformation, overconsumption — and the platform maximises engagement.

Why we logged it. A formal treatment of the thing we keep asserting — attention as a scarce, priced, allocable resource, distributed today by an opaque recommender in the platform's interest, and worth asking who should get to claim it. Caveat: an unrefereed preprint proposing a mechanism, not evidence about any deployed system; "producer welfare" here means content creators.

06 Aug 2026

Regulation·First Judicial District Court, New Mexico

A New Mexico court orders Meta to fund $567 million in youth-harm remedies — and refuses to touch the engagement features

In the remedies phase of State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc., Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid found Meta's platforms a "public nuisance" that significantly contributes to a state teen mental health crisis, and ordered Meta to pay $567 million into an abatement fund for treatment, awareness and monitoring — on top of the $375 million a jury awarded in March. But the Attorney General had asked the court to force removal of infinite scroll and autoplay, and the judge declined: "regulation of industry-wide features that contribute to problematic use, such as infinite scroll and autoplay, require legislative or executive branch action," and ordering feature changes could run afoul of the First Amendment and Section 230.

Why we logged it. The most aggressive youth-harm remedy in the US to date funds the treatment of the symptom and leaves the extraction mechanism — the engagement architecture itself — legally untouched. The money is paid; the machine keeps running. Caveat: a first-instance state ruling, and Meta says it will appeal.

06 Aug 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

Doctorow — social media without socializing

Cory Doctorow's argument is that Zuckerberg profits from a fact he resents — "you love your friends more than you hate him," and those friends are what keep you on Facebook and Instagram. The trouble, for Zuck, is that friends "just want to be your friends"; they do not "maximize your engagement" so he can show you more ads. Doctorow traces the workarounds: tuning the algorithm to swap friends for flamewar-baiting trolls, recruiting engagement-farming "theater kids" on an intermittent-reward revshare, and now flooding the feeds with chatbots — "social media without socializing," bots "tuned to keep you scrolling no matter what" that "will never demand anything of Meta."

Why we logged it. A clean statement of the core antagonism — engagement optimisation is structurally opposed to the human connection it feeds on, and the endgame is to replace the people with machines that extract attention without friction. Caveat: a polemical blog essay, not reporting; it links its sources throughout.

05 Aug 2026

Research·arXiv / AIES 2026

The first audit of ads inside ChatGPT finds the tax falls hardest on the poor

The first empirical study of advertising inside a large language model's interface. Using a "sock puppet" audit — 91 automated accounts signalling three racial/ethnic groups and three income terciles through geolocation and prompt cues — Emma Lurie, Ro Encarnación, Sorelle A. Friedler and Danaé Metaxa collected over 3,000 ads from 186 advertisers across 335 prompts on ChatGPT. Two findings stand out: accounts began receiving ads 14 days after creation, and lower-income accounts, regardless of race, were more likely to be shown ads. In this first phase the ads skewed to consumer goods and stayed visually separated from the model's answers — a separation the authors expect to erode as ads are integrated more deeply.

Why we logged it. Independent measurement, in a peer-reviewed venue, of the attention tax arriving inside the interface people now use to think — and of who pays it most. Caveat: a preprint, accepted to AAAI/ACM AIES 2026; it audits one platform in an early test phase with simulated rather than real users, and reports association, not a causal effect of income on ad delivery.

04 Aug 2026

Research·European Journal of Public Health

Digital engagement and adolescent wellbeing — the UK Millennium Cohort Study

Using 24-hour time-use diaries from 3,288 fourteen-year-olds — 144 consecutive ten-minute slots each — the authors ran latent profile analysis to find real daily patterns rather than treating "screen time" as a single number, then linked those patterns to later psychological wellbeing. Three profiles emerged: "frequent digital users" (21%, heavy gaming, more male and lower-income, poorest wellbeing), "physically active, moderate digital users" (59.7%, best wellbeing), and "in-person socialisers, low digital users" (19.3%, intermediate). Their conclusion: balance across the whole day, not digital time in isolation, is what tracks wellbeing — digital use matters largely through what it displaces.

Why we logged it. A careful, peer-reviewed corrective to crude "screen time bad" accounting — the harm sits in the trade-offs the extraction economy engineers people into, not a raw hours-on-glass count. Caveat: observational, so associations rather than causation; a wellbeing study, not a study of extractive design as such. Published in the European Journal of Public Health.

03 Aug 2026

Research·Nature Human Behaviour

A peer-reviewed number for what early social media costs a child's schooling

Drawing on 5,227 students across 28 northern Italian schools, matched to standardised test records, Marco Gui and colleagues find that children who opened a personal social media account at 11-12 scored around 0.22 standard deviations lower in Italian and 0.18 lower in maths by age 13-14 — the maths gap widening to 0.27 by 15-16. The team put 0.2 SD at roughly six months of schooling. Opening an account later narrowed the gap in a clean dose-response pattern, and the association ran through how often pupils checked their phones. There was no effect on English scores. A research briefing accompanies the paper.

Why we logged it. A citable, peer-reviewed figure for a cost we usually argue in the abstract: attention extracted early leaves a measurable, durable deficit in what a child learns. Caveat: the study is observational and cannot prove causation, social media use was self-reported, and the authors themselves ask that it be read cautiously.

July 2026

20 entries

30 Jul 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

Doctorow — The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing

Cory Doctorow's account of surveillance pricing as AI's one indisputable commercial success: feed a model behavioural data, let it cluster your customers, and let it run continuous experiments to find the maximum markup each group will stomach — "it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most." He cites the FTC's finding that profiled new parents are shown higher-priced thermometers at night, Instacart's markups of up to a third, and Delta's abandoned per-seat scheme. The goal, he argues, is to shift all consumer surplus to the platform: you are "gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need."

Why we logged it. The extraction thesis extended from attention to price — the same dossiers that target what you see now reprice what you need. Caveat: a polemic in support of California's AB 2564; it pairs with the EFF letter logged below.

29 Jul 2026

Regulation·US Federal Trade Commission

The FTC and two states sue Hims & Hers over health data shared with ad platforms

The FTC, joined by Utah and California, filed a federal complaint alleging the telehealth provider shared consumers' sensitive health information — conditions disclosed in medical intake forms — with advertising platforms including Meta and Snap, via customer lists and tracking technologies that relayed visitors' on-site actions, while promising patient privacy. Alongside sit classic dark-pattern claims: charging almost immediately after intake despite promising a provider consultation first, auto-enrolment into recurring subscriptions, and a cancel button hidden behind an "add/remove items from order" flow.

Why we logged it. Extraction on both ends of the funnel — the most intimate category of personal data monetised into ad-targeting infrastructure, while interface design stops the customer leaving. Caveat: allegations in a filed complaint, not findings; the case will be decided by the court.

28 Jul 2026

Regulation·New York Office of the Attorney General

New York finalises the SAFE for Kids Act — addictive feeds off by default for under-18s

New York released the final rules implementing the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, which requires social-media companies to switch off algorithmically personalised feeds and overnight notifications (12am–6am) for users under 18 unless a parent consents. The rules define the target precisely: an "addictive feed" is an endless, personalised stream built on data the platform gathers, "designed to encourage a user to continue to use and return to a platform," and the law bites on platforms where users spend at least 20 percent of their time on such feeds. Under-18s who decline the feed are not cut off — they see the same content from accounts they follow, in a set order such as chronological. The rules take effect 25 January 2027.

Why we logged it. A state legislating against the feed mechanism itself — the engineered capture of attention and return-visits — rather than the content inside it; Governor Hochul's line, "our kids' mental health isn't for sale," names it as an extraction. Caveat: a child-protection measure, not an attention-market instrument; it applies only to minors, and its age-assurance requirements raise their own privacy questions.

28 Jul 2026

Regulation·Electronic Frontier Foundation

San Francisco stalls its backing of California's surveillance-pricing ban

California's AB 2564 (Ward) would ban "a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance" — with carve-outs for cost-based differences, retention discounts, and uniformly posted discounts. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors was set to pass a resolution of support, then stalled the vote after a single Chamber of Commerce letter recycling objections the bill's text already answers. EFF's rebuttal letter restates the principle: privacy is a right, not a currency, and a fair price should not depend on submitting to surveillance.

Why we logged it. A working ban on converting harvested data into higher prices, met by organised lobbying at the municipal level — a live study in how extraction defends itself. Caveat: advocacy around a pending bill, not a regulator action; the resolution fight is procedural, and the bill's fate sits with the state legislature.

24 Jul 2026

Regulation·European Commission

The Commission tells TikTok to stop feeding minors into the For You Feed

The European Commission sent TikTok preliminary findings that its minors' account settings breach the Digital Services Act. On TikTok, minors can set an account to "public," and the default lets content from 16–17 year-olds be recommended to any user — including people with no TikTok account — through the For You Feed. The Commission's view is that a minor's content should by default be visible only to contacts the minor has accepted, and that TikTok "should refrain from recommending minors' content to other TikTok users through the For You Feed."

Why we logged it. A regulator naming the recommender itself as the mechanism at fault — treating an engagement-maximising default as a harm to be switched off, the same move made against Meta on addictive design. Caveat: a preliminary finding, not a decision, and framed around child safety and privacy rather than attention monetisation; TikTok's separate advertising-transparency issues were closed by binding commitments in December 2025.

23 Jul 2026

Regulation·European Commission

The Commission issues its first DMA fines against Google — €890 million

The European Commission took two decisions finding Google in breach of the Digital Markets Act, its first fines under the regime: €460 million for self-preferencing its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results above third parties in Search, and €430 million for anti-steering restrictions that stopped Google Play developers directing users to cheaper channels off-platform. Google has been ordered to bring both practices to an end, with the DMA's escalating penalties available for repeat non-compliance.

Why we logged it. A regulator naming and pricing the mechanics of platform self-dealing — the gatekeeper taking a cut of the attention and the transactions it did not earn. Caveat: the case concerns search-ranking prominence and app-store steering, not advertising revenue as such, and a one-off fine at this scale functions closer to a price than a deterrent.

23 Jul 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

Doctorow — California's privacy obstacle course

Cory Doctorow walks through the sign-up flow for California's new Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP): a Login.gov identity, redundant driver's-licence photos, hunting down your mobile advertising identifier, and repeated re-verification of a phone and email the system has already confirmed. His argument is that the process assumes everyone wants to be surveilled and makes leaving laborious — while a data broker's cost to open a file on you is "Step one: Exist. Step two: There is no step two."

Why we logged it. Consent theatre described precisely — the burden of not being surveilled dumped on the surveilled, when it belongs on the extractor. Caveat: a polemical blog post; Doctorow still urges readers to complete the process, because the underlying harm is real.

21 Jul 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

Doctorow — the cookie banner as a rigged market stall

Cory Doctorow takes John Gruber's coinage "dickover" — the modal popover that deliberately obscures a page to force an unwanted interaction (cookie consent, app nag, terms of service) — and reads Europe's cookie-banner epidemic as malicious compliance with the GDPR. Surveillance firms stretch "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our terms of service say we will," he writes, yet insist it cannot possibly cover remembering that you already told them not to. He ends on the market metaphor directly: this is "a very curious sort of market" where "as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet."

Why we logged it. Consent theatre read as a rigged exchange — prices "set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold," with ad-blocking recast as the user bargaining back. Caveat: a polemical post whose back half is a practical how-to (Firefox, Reader Mode, Adblock Plus); the quotable framing is in the opening and the close.

17 Jul 2026

Research·JAMA Network Open

Problematic social-media use comes before the attention problems, not after

A prospective cohort study across five annual waves of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (11,286 US youths) finds that, within individuals, years of higher-than-usual problematic social-media use were followed by elevated parent-reported ADHD symptoms (β ≈ 0.08), with the effect stronger in boys. The reverse path — ADHD symptoms driving later use — was small and sporadic.

Why we logged it. Large-sample, within-person evidence that compulsive platform use appears to precede attentional difficulty rather than merely coincide with it. Caveat: the authors stress the population-level effect sizes are small, and problematic use is self-reported.

15 Jul 2026

Regulation·Ofcom

Ofcom counts the age checks — 69 million of them — and finds the harm largely intact

Ofcom's first statutory Use of Age Assurance Report finds that in the first six months of the Online Safety Act's child-protection duties (July–December 2025), 69 million age checks were completed across the 32 services examined — a 23-fold increase — with facial age estimation and photo-ID matching the dominant methods. The judgment is mixed: checks deterred access on pornography sites that implemented them, but Ofcom says it has "not seen a material reduction in the volume of harmful content being surfaced to children" and that age assurance "is not delivering the intended outcome." No single method eliminates circumvention; the regulator calls for layered protections.

Why we logged it. A regulator putting a number on a compulsory friction imposed at national scale, then honestly assessing whether the extraction it was meant to interrupt actually fell — the discipline attention markets have never been subjected to. Caveat: this is child-safety regulation, not attention-market regulation; the relevance is by analogy of method, not subject.

15 Jul 2026

Research·The BMJ

The BMJ — treat social media like tobacco, and expect it to adapt like tobacco

Writing in The BMJ, Amrit Kaur Purba and colleagues argue that adolescent social media restrictions — including outright bans — should be treated as complex-systems interventions rather than isolated behavioural policies, because they sit inside a system of families, schools, governments and commercial actors. They frame social media as a commercial determinant of health and draw on the tobacco and alcohol playbooks to predict how platforms will adapt after regulation — politically, scientifically, technologically and economically — including redefining what counts as "social media" so as to fall outside the new rules.

Why we logged it. The extraction case in a public-health register — the industry modelled as a rational actor defending a revenue stream, not a neutral service, and certain to route around any rule that leaves the revenue intact. Caveat: an analysis article rather than new empirical data, and its subject is the regulation of minors rather than the attention transfer itself.

14 Jul 2026

Critique·Verfassungsblog

Morgan — Press-release governance: the legality of the Commission's addictive-design findings

Julian Morgan (Weizenbaum Institute) argues the Commission's preliminary findings against Meta rest on a contestable legal basis — Articles 34–35 DSA were drafted deliberately vague, no guidelines on "addictive design" exist, and the leap from "mitigate systemic risks" to "autoplay must be off by default" may not survive the legality principle in court. He reads the findings instead as strategy (leverage toward negotiated design commitments) and symbolism (performing digital sovereignty on a news-cycle timescale, with any court defeat arriving years after attention has moved on).

Why we logged it. The sharpest sentence is the one aimed at the frame itself: the psychologically framed addiction harm does "useful representational work" while leaving "comparatively invisible the underlying business model of advertisement-funded data extraction." Even flagship enforcement, in this reading, regulates the symptom and shields the revenue model. Caveat: a legal-scholarship blog post, sympathetic to acting against addictive design but critical of the mode.

10 Jul 2026

Regulation·European Commission

The Commission preliminarily finds Instagram and Facebook's addictive design in breach of the DSA

The European Commission has preliminarily found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act over the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook — the investigation focused on infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems. The finding is twofold: Meta did not adequately assess the risks its design posed to the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults, and the mitigations it deployed failed to address them. It is the second DSA addictive-design case after TikTok (February 2026); non-compliance can carry fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover.

Why we logged it. The biggest regulatory landing on this site's core argument since it launched — a regulator asserting, for the second time in five months, that the engagement architecture is itself the violation, not the content it carries. Caveat: preliminary findings, not a decision. Meta has the right of defence, no fine has been imposed, and Meta says the findings do not recognise its Teen Accounts work.

08 Jul 2026

Regulation·New York City

New York City writes click-to-cancel into law — and moves on junk fees

New York City finalised a Click-to-Cancel rule making it, by the administration's account, the first municipality in the nation to require that cancelling a subscription be as easy as signing up — subscribe online, cancel online — paired with a separately proposed all-in pricing rule banning hidden "junk fees." The city projects the cancel rule alone will save New Yorkers up to $162.5 million a year, with penalties starting at $350 per violation; it takes effect 1 October 2026.

Why we logged it. A government treating designed friction — the hard-to-find cancel button, the fee revealed only at checkout — as a compulsory extraction of money and time, and pricing it. The same move this site makes about attention, applied where the transfer is denominated in dollars. Caveat: the junk-fee rule is a proposal in its comment period; both are municipal rules stepping into the gap left when a US appeals court vacated the FTC's federal click-to-cancel rule in 2025.

02 Jul 2026

Regulation·Court of Justice of the EU

Google's €4.125bn Android fine is final — and the Court says defaults extract

The Court of Justice dismissed Google and Alphabet's appeal against the 2022 Android judgment, fixing the fine at €4.125 billion and closing the case permanently. The reasoning matters more than the number: the Court confirmed the finding of "a status quo bias in favour of pre-installed apps," and that Google "had not demonstrated that user preferences or the alleged quality of their services alone accounted for the behaviours observed." No counterfactual analysis was required.

Why we logged it. A court accepting, as settled EU law, that default placement produces user behaviour that preference does not explain — the legal shadow of the claim this site makes about attention, stated in the language of Article 102. Caveat: the conduct concerns search distribution between 2011 and 2018, not advertising or attention markets, and the remedy flows to competitors, not to the people whose defaults were set.

01 Jul 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

Doctorow — Technocarcinization: every platform is evolving into Facebook

Cory Doctorow borrows "carcinisation" — the way unrelated species keep evolving into crabs — to describe how Apple, Google, and Meta are all drifting into the same corner of his old grid: maximally surveilling and maximally controlling. Apple, once the "we don't spy" walled garden, now runs on-device ad targeting; Google, once the company that sent you out to the open web, walls searchers inside AI summaries and nerfs Chrome's ad-blocking. His claim is that the convergence is driven not by the people in charge but by a policy environment where surveillance and lock-in are the traits that survive.

Why we logged it. The extraction case stated as evolutionary pressure — "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half right, Doctorow writes; "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Caveat: a polemical blog post, and the grid is a rhetorical device, not a measurement.

01 Jul 2026

Regulation·Connecticut General Assembly

Connecticut bans engagement-extension design — and targeted ads — for minors

The 2025 amendments to the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (SB 1295) take effect on 1 July 2026. They impose a categorical bar on processing a minor's personal data for targeted advertising or any sale, regardless of consent — and, separately, prohibit using "any system design feature to significantly increase, sustain or extend any minor's use" of a service. Signed by Gov. Lamont in June 2025; the new impact-assessment duties attach to processing created on or after 1 August 2026.

Why we logged it. A US state writing the engagement-hold mechanism into statute and switching it off for minors — the design itself named as the harm, not merely the data taken or the hours spent. Caveat: a state law, limited to minors, and consent survives as a route for some essential-service profiling.

— Jul 2026

Regulation·California Privacy Protection Agency

California's one-request data-broker deletion becomes enforceable

Under the 2023 Delete Act, California's Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP) lets a verified resident file a single request that requires every registered data broker to delete their personal information and stop selling or sharing it — replacing the old broker-by-broker opt-out. The platform has been live since 1 January 2026; from 1 August 2026 brokers are legally obliged to honour these centralised requests, with a 90-day window to delete and confirm.

Why we logged it. The first working, government-run mechanism to claw back extracted data at scale — the extractor, not the extracted, made to act. Caveat: it is opt-out rather than opt-in, so it still treats surveillance as the default state, and the sign-up burden is heavy (see Doctorow, same week).

— Jul 2026

Research·Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Excessive screen time, mental health, and the mediators in between

Now peer-reviewed in Nature Portfolio's Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, an analysis of 50,231 US children and adolescents (National Survey of Children's Health, 2020–2021) finds four or more hours of daily screen time associated with higher risks of anxiety, depression, conduct problems, and ADHD. Structural-equation modelling locates most of the association in what screen time displaces: physical activity is the strongest mediator (roughly 31–39% of the effect), followed by irregular bedtime and short sleep.

Why we logged it. The harm is real and large-scale, but it runs mostly through displaced sleep and movement — a more defensible claim than screens acting directly on the mind. Caveat: cross-sectional and parent-reported, and it does not separate advertising-driven feeds from other use.

— Jul 2026

Regulation·UK Information Commissioner's Office

The counter-current: the ICO loosens consent for "low-risk" advertising

While the regulatory current of 2026 mostly runs toward constraining platforms, the UK's data regulator has been moving the other way on consent. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 introduced new categories of cookies exempt from PECR's consent requirement (in force 5 February), and in May the ICO advised the government on creating a "consent-free route" for low-risk online advertising — a posture that earlier saw it accept Meta's "consent-or-pay" model as capable of lawfulness.

Why we logged it. The near-photographic negative of the Conversion Dividend — rather than declaring a share of ad revenue owed back, a regulator is widening the circumstances in which attention can be taken without a consent step at all. Read against Ofcom's report of the same fortnight, the UK state is pulling in two directions at once. Caveat: UK-specific, framed as reducing compliance friction for "low-risk" processing, and a composite of several 2026 developments rather than a single dated action.

June 2026

9 entries

29 Jun 2026

Regulation·noyb / US Supreme Court

The Supreme Court strips the FTC of independence — and the EU–US data deal loses its foundation

In Trump v. Slaughter (29 June), a 6–3 Supreme Court upheld the President's power to dismiss an FTC commissioner and held the agency's statutory independence unconstitutional. Max Schrems' noyb argues the consequence is structural: the EU's adequacy decision for US data transfers leans on the "independent" FTC 259 times, and EU treaty law requires independent oversight — so the legal basis of the EU–US Data Privacy Framework has collapsed. noyb has asked the Commission to withdraw the deal in an orderly way and says it will file suit.

Why we logged it. The accountability layer meant to police cross-border surveillance dismantled in a single ruling — the oversight the whole data pipeline was supposed to answer to, gone. Caveat: no immediate effect. The Commission's decision stands until it repeals it or the CJEU annuls it, and a court challenge could take two to three years.

23 Jun 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

Doctorow — "Age verification" is not verification, it is mass surveillance

Cory Doctorow argues there is no such thing as "age verification" for the internet — what is sold under that name is mass surveillance, "so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry's commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia." An age-check mandate would require everyone online to submit to fine-grained tracking of all their activity, handing the surveillance-advertising industry a world where avoiding tracking is illegal. The harms to children people fear, he writes, "all start with surveillance" — kids cannot be targeted or funnelled toward harmful content without the commercial spying that primes the funnel.

Why we logged it. The child-safety frame turned inside out — the surveillance sold as protection is the mechanism of extraction, and Doctorow ties it straight to the wallet: the data "is being used to raise the prices you pay and lower the wages you're offered." Caveat: a polemical post, and its sharpest claims — VPN bans, ICE misuse — are where the argument leads, not events that have happened.

15 Jun 2026

Regulation·United Kingdom

Britain moves to ban under-16s from social media

Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the UK will bar under-16s from a range of social platforms — Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X — while exempting messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal, and will block livestreaming and stranger-contact for under-16s. The government, calling it a "landmark" move, will bring measures to Parliament before Christmas, with protections expected in force next spring, putting the onus on platforms to keep children off and threatening large fines. A national consultation drew more than 116,000 responses; 90% backed a minimum age of 16.

Why we logged it. A national government treating access to the engagement-maximising feed itself as the harm — not the content within it, nor the hours spent. Caveat: announced, not yet law, and enforcement is the open question — Australia's parallel under-16 ban, in force since December 2025, is already struggling, and age verification carries its own privacy and free-expression costs.

13 Jun 2026

Regulation·European Commission

The Digital Omnibus keeps moving — and the fight is over who may override your "no"

The Commission's Digital Omnibus Regulation (proposed 19 November 2025) would mandate a single-click reject with equal prominence to "accept," bar re-prompting for the same purpose for at least six months after a refusal, and require sites to honour browser- or device-level privacy preference signals. One carve-out has drawn fire: media providers whose revenue depends primarily on advertising would be exempt from honouring those signals — a carve-out France's Alliance Digitale is fighting, calling (21 May 2026) to delete the centralised cookie mechanism and the six-month re-consent ban.

Why we logged it. The mechanism by which refusal is registered — and who is permitted to override it — is the live battleground. A durable, machine-readable "no" is the precondition for any honest accounting of extracted attention. Caveat: a proposal, not law; GDPR and ePrivacy remain in force, and if adopted it phases in over up to four years.

06 Jun 2026

Research·arXiv preprint

Luo, Yao & Zhang — a platform's "sleep reminder" campaign increased late-night use

A large-scale field experiment on a short-video platform tested a "sleep reminder" campaign meant to reduce late-night use. It did the opposite: late-night engagement rose 14.75%, overall usage rose 2.18%, and the effects persisted for weeks after the campaign ended. The mechanism is the finding — the intervention acted as forced exploration, revealing latent demand the recommender would never have surfaced on its own, and the algorithm updated its policy on that data, "reinforcing the very engagement loops the campaign aimed to mitigate."

Why we logged it. Close to a controlled demonstration of this site's core claim: an engagement-optimising system metabolises even wellbeing interventions into more extraction. Any "digital wellbeing" feature evaluated as a static nudge, while the algorithm underneath keeps learning, is measured wrong by construction. Caveat: an unrefereed preprint, and one unnamed platform.

— Jun 2026

Critique·New Media & Society

Lee — Brain rot: cognitive decomposition as a structural externality of attention assetization

Hera Hyeonseo Lee (Binghamton University) theorises "brain rot" not as cultural decline but as a structural condition: in the post-2008 turn from material expansion toward cognitive extraction, platforms "assetize" attention to stabilise their speculative valuations, inducing a rewiring that degrades the capacity for sustained thought. The argument is built from SEC filings and earnings transcripts of Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon — tying the architecture of corporate finance directly to systemic cognitive shifts.

Why we logged it. The extraction tied explicitly to share-price logic, and the resulting cognitive damage named as an externality — a cost the public absorbs so the firms can hold their valuations. The Conversion Dividend's moral premise, in political-economy terms. Caveat: a single-author theoretical article reasoning from financial documents, not a measurement of individuals' cognition.

— Jun 2026

Research·PNAS

Differentiation drives the erosion of positivity on social media

Analysing 2.05 billion comments across 2,150 Reddit communities, Hongkai Mao and colleagues find that discourse becomes measurably more negative over time — within individual threads and across a community's history — and that the trend is mediated by the semantic uniqueness of comments. The mechanism: users compete to say something new, negative information is more heterogeneous and counter-normative than positive information, so as a conversation fills up, the cheapest remaining way to be distinctive is to be negative. The negativity emerges without anyone intending it.

Why we logged it. The extraction argument in its purest form — a structural property of a scarce-attention contest producing a harm that no individual participant chose. The nastiness is not the users; it is the contest they are made to compete in. Caveat: observational analysis of one platform, establishing a robust pattern and plausible mechanism rather than a controlled causal test — and it concerns user-generated negativity, not advertising or platform design directly.

04 Jun 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

Delusion as a service

Cory Doctorow likens the internet — and now sycophantic chatbots — to Disney's "Mission: Space" centrifuge: benign for almost everyone, but a machine for surfacing rare, dormant vulnerabilities in the few it harms. Applied to "AI psychosis," he argues chatbots supply "delusional reinforcement as a service, on tap, 24/7," and that even if they only amplify rather than cause delusion, mass deployment guarantees mass harm absent mitigation.

Why we logged it. Extends the extraction case from attention to psychological fault lines — engagement-maximising systems, run at scale, inevitably reach the people least able to withstand them. Caveat: its subject is AI-driven delusion, not advertising or the attention-tax framing specifically.

03 Jun 2026

Regulation·Illinois General Assembly

Illinois passes a bill banning algorithmic feeds for minors

The General Assembly passed the Children's Online Social Media Safety Act (HB 5511) unanimously — 57-0 in the Senate, 113-0 in the House — and Gov. JB Pritzker has said he will sign it. The law bars platforms from using a minor's viewing history or on-device data to rank their feed: feeds for under-18s may show only what the user searched for, requested, or follows, and notifications are prohibited between 10pm and 7am. Enforcement runs through the Attorney General, with fines of $2,500–$7,500 per child.

Why we logged it. The cleanest legislative statement yet that the engagement-ranked feed itself is the harm — not merely the content inside it. For minors, the extraction mechanism is simply switched off. Caveat: it takes effect in 2028, and tech lobbyists have flagged First Amendment challenges.

May 2026

10 entries

27 May 2026

Research·Nature

Brady et al. — the less extractive feed that users liked just as much

A large-scale field experiment altered the feed-ranking algorithm on Bluesky during the 2024 US presidential election. A "diversified extremity" algorithm — making feeds more representative of the actual population of users — reduced exposure to polarising content and produced more accurate perceptions of social norms, without reducing users' enjoyment of the platform. Both the experimental feed and a plain reverse-chronological feed surfaced less uncivil content than standard engagement-based ranking.

Why we logged it. The counterfactual the industry insists does not exist. The trade-off — engagement optimisation or a worse product — did not appear: if a less extractive feed costs nothing in satisfaction, then the extraction is a revenue choice, not a design necessity. Caveat: run on Bluesky — small, self-selecting, technically literate, and with no advertising business — so it does not establish the same result at Meta or TikTok scale. The full paper is paywalled; the Research Briefing is open.

25 May 2026

Critique·Pluralistic

No honor among (ad-tech) thieves

Cory Doctorow uses the Cox Media settlement as the spine for a clean restatement of the case — ad-tech firms lie to users about what they take, and to advertisers about what they deliver. He cites the Procter and Gamble experiment, in which a $200m annual surveillance-advertising spend was zeroed out with zero effect on sales.

Why we logged it. The clearest May statement of the argument from the other side — if the extraction is largely waste, the user is owed the share the advertiser is being scammed out of.

21 May 2026

Regulation·FTC

FTC settles with Cox Media Group over "Active Listening" ad targeting

Cox Media Group and two co-respondents will pay just under $1m to settle FTC charges that they deceived buyers about an AI-powered service that claimed to record and transcribe consumer conversations via smart devices for ad targeting. The action treats inflated ad-tech surveillance claims as actionable deception against the buyer, not only the user.

Why we logged it. A regulator finally punishing one ad-tech firm for lying to another about how much it surveils — proof the extraction is real, and the boasts about it are inflated.

18 May 2026

Research·arXiv preprint

Generative AI advertising as a problem of trustworthy commercial intervention

Qiu and Mei (University of Michigan) argue generative AI changes advertising in kind, not degree. Rather than dropping a product into a slot, it intervenes on the model's output itself — shaping product mentions, information framing, behavioural redirection, and long-term preference through channels users cannot easily detect. Deployed systems and regulators govern only the most visible tier, while the influence most consequential for user autonomy goes unmeasured and undisclosed.

Why we logged it. Extraction moving from your attention to your judgement — the ask hidden inside the answer. A preprint, not yet peer-reviewed.

14 May 2026

Critique·The Ideas Letter

Slobodian — Digital Bandung: stress-testing the language of extraction

Quinn Slobodian interrogates the now-ubiquitous register of "digital empire" and "data colonialism" — Zuboff, Couldry and Mejias, Hao, Crawford — and argues it too often "mistakes polemic for analysis." Subjecting the empire metaphor to the actual history of empires, he proposes three sharper concepts (the comprador, the creole, counter-colonisation) and insists that Global North users are not simply expropriated "digital natives" but "digital creoles," whose pension funds and portfolios are bound up in the very firms extracting from them.

Why we logged it. The most serious engagement with this site's own vocabulary in months — and it partly cuts against us. Its warning that "extraction" used loosely becomes an emotional rather than analytical category is a useful discipline for a movement built on a metaphor: naming a tax is powerful, but the name has to survive contact with how value actually moves. Caveat: a critical essay, not evidence — cite it as a sharpening counterpoint, not an ally.

12 May 2026

Regulation·House Energy & Commerce

Pallone opens a surveillance-pricing inquiry into 25 retailers

Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Frank Pallone wrote to 25 major retailers and grocers — Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Target, and Costco among them — demanding to know whether they feed individual shoppers' personal data into algorithms to charge different people different prices for the same goods, with answers due 26 May. The letters cite a Consumer Reports investigation into Instacart's AI pricing tests, and argue the absence of a federal privacy law is the gap that lets the practice spread.

Why we logged it. The extraction logic turned on price itself — your data harvested to set what you pay. A congressional record of the mechanism, before any finding. Caveat: a minority-party information request, not legislation or enforcement.

12 May 2026

Regulation·European Commission

Von der Leyen commits to a Digital Fairness Act naming addictive design

The Commission President publicly committed to bringing forward the Digital Fairness Act, naming infinite scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications as "addictive and harmful design practices" engineered to maximise engagement. The Parliament's Legislative Train confirms the DFA as a Q4 2026 initiative targeting dark patterns, addictive design, and unfair personalisation.

Why we logged it. An EU institution naming engagement-maximising design as a harm in its own right — the mechanics of extraction, not only a privacy or competition problem. Announced, not yet tabled, and framed so far around minors.

08 May 2026

Regulation·European Commission

EU draft guidelines on AI Act Article 50 transparency

The European Commission published draft guidelines on the AI Act's Article 50 transparency obligations, which become enforceable on 2 August 2026 and cover interactive-AI disclosure, deepfake labelling, and biometric categorisation. For advertising specifically, the draft confirms commercial speech does not get the artistic-expression exception — AI-generated influencer and celebrity ads must carry the disclosure. Consultation runs to 3 June.

Why we logged it. A forward dated mechanism for labelling synthetic ad content at scale, with penalties up to 3% of global turnover. The first real test of whether transparency can be enforced on the surfaces themselves.

04 May 2026

Regulation·FTC

FTC v Kochava — the first ban on a US data broker selling sensitive location data

A stipulated final order prohibits Kochava and its subsidiary Collective Data Solutions from selling, sharing, or disclosing sensitive location data without affirmative express consent, ending a case the Commission filed in August 2022. The settlement requires a sensitive-location-data programme, supplier consent assessments, and a public-facing withdrawal mechanism.

Why we logged it. The first concrete enforcement on the data-broker layer of the attention economy — the layer that converts location, behaviour, and intent into priced inventory.

04 May 2026

Regulation·Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF tells the EU to regulate surveillance advertising, not "addictive design"

Ahead of the EU's Q4 2026 Digital Fairness Act, the EFF argues the law should target the root causes — surveillance-based business models and deceptive design — rather than pile more control onto users through age verification. It calls for an explicit ban on dark patterns, a direct attack on surveillance advertising and unfair profiling, a ban on pay-for-privacy schemes ("users should not have to trade their data or pay extra to avoid being tracked"), and mandatory recognition of browser and operating-system privacy signals.

Why we logged it. A leading digital-rights body framing surveillance advertising itself, not its symptoms, as the thing to regulate — the Time Tax thesis in policy language. An advocacy submission, not law; the DFA is not expected until Q4 2026.

April 2026

4 entries

28 Apr 2026

Regulation·Maryland General Assembly

Maryland becomes the first state to ban surveillance-data price hikes

Signed 28 April 2026, Maryland's Protection from Predatory Pricing Act makes it the first US state to bar large food retailers and third-party delivery apps from using surveillance data or dynamic pricing to set a higher price. It lands on top of New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act — in force since November 2025, which forces a blunt on-screen label: "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA" — and the FTC's own study, which found intermediaries using signals as fine as mouse movements, browser history, and abandoned-cart contents to set individualised prices across at least 250 retail clients.

Why we logged it. The extraction argument made literal — the data taken from you converted directly into the price you pay — and the policy response moving from disclosure toward prohibition. Caveat: narrow and sector-specific (Maryland covers only certain food retail; New York is disclosure, not a ban), and there is still no federal statute.

24 Apr 2026

Research·SSRN working paper

Yuan — The attention economy as extractive regime

Yongming Yuan argues that "attention economy" misleads if it implies attention only recently became scarce — attention scarcity is an old human condition. What is new is the declining threshold of extractability: digital infrastructure can now capture, measure, and monetise "sub-threshold attention fragments" — glances, pauses, scroll hesitations, interruption windows — that earlier media could not profitably organise. He proposes a minimal-threshold model in which an attentional unit becomes extractable once its expected return exceeds the marginal cost of capturing it, and closes with a class account of sellers, buyers, and protectors of attention.

Why we logged it. The closest academic articulation yet of the thing this site names — value extracted from attention so small the person never notices the transfer. Caveat: a self-posted working paper by an independent author — not peer-reviewed, fourteen pages — a conceptual contribution and a useful citation for the framing, not empirical evidence.

15 Apr 2026

Research·Pew Research Center

Pew — Teens' Experiences on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat

Pew's first cross-platform teen comparison (n=1,458, fielded Sep–Oct 2025) finds that roughly 30% of teen TikTok users say they spend too much time on the app — and 44% of parents say so of their teen. TikTok users are also markedly more likely than Instagram or Snapchat users to report harm to sleep and productivity.

Why we logged it. The users say it themselves. Survey data Time Tax can cite when the argument needs voice, not theory.

01 Apr 2026

Research·SSRN working paper

Catovic — Attention scarcity and builder saturation in digital markets

Armin Catovic models digital-market growth under a finite attention constraint and shows that the equilibrium attention available to each builder converges to a ratio of entry cost to monetisation rate. The paper formalises attention as a scarce, contested resource at platform scale, not as an unbounded externality.

Why we logged it. A formal economic statement of the premise the framework rests on — attention is scarce, monetisation rate is the lever, distribution follows from policy.

March 2026

3 entries

13 Mar 2026

Research·arXiv preprint

Daily affect fluctuations in phone screen content predict anxiety and depression

An intensive year-long study captured a smartphone screenshot every five seconds from 145 adults — roughly 111 million images — and scored each for emotional valence and arousal with a deep-learning model, alongside biweekly mental-health assessments. Day-to-day shifts in the emotional tone of what people saw on screen predicted subsequent changes in depression and anxiety; stable between-person differences did not.

Why we logged it. Moves the case past "screen time" to the content of attention as the active ingredient — what platforms feed you, not merely how long. A preprint, not yet peer-reviewed.

02 Mar 2026

Research·SSRN working paper

Chen, Li & Preuss — Algorithmic attention and content creation on social media platforms

The authors study the revenue-maximising allocation of attention on ad-funded social media, modelling the platform's choice to direct attention either to ads (immediate monetisation) or to creators (to grow inventory). The algorithmic feed emerges as a deliberate allocation against advertisers and creators — not a neutral surfacing.

Why we logged it. Useful citation for the Conversion Dividend argument — the feed is an allocation decision, and allocations are governable.

01 Mar 2026

Critique·Politics & Society (Sage)

Mariani — Regulating the attention economy: the possibilities and limits of antitrust

A legal-scholarly argument that competition-focused antitrust is the wrong tool — more competition can intensify the race to capture attention and deepen the harm. Isabella Luisa Mariani calls for abandoning the price-based consumer-welfare standard, conceptualising markets for attention, and imposing ex ante limits on data-mining and behavioural advertising, with user autonomy as the governing standard.

Why we logged it. An academic case that the harm is the extraction itself, not market concentration — adjacent to the premise that the underlying relationship is non-consensual.

February 2026

2 entries

— Feb 2026

Research·Stanford Law Review

Newman — Attention Capitalism: the law and political economy of attention markets

John M. Newman (78 Stan. L. Rev. 415) argues that a wide range of legal regimes — antitrust, privacy, contract, and tax — have together funnelled human activity into "attention markets," where people trade attention for access to search, social media, and the like, and concentrated power among a few firms. The article proposes a broad overhaul of US law to deconcentrate those markets.

Why we logged it. The nearest formal legal scaffolding yet for treating attention as a market with measurable value — a scholarly cousin to the Conversion Dividend's premise that captured attention is value owed back. Caveat: its remedies are structural and doctrinal, not a revenue-return mechanism.

20 Feb 2026

Research·SSRN working paper

Thomas — Taxing Attention

Kathleen DeLaney Thomas gives the attention economy a tax-law treatment, taking up the Pigouvian idea — taxing attention capture to internalise its social cost — and working through how such a levy would sit inside real tax policy, across social media and the broader market for attention.

Why we logged it. The closest formal cousin of the Conversion Dividend yet. Where the Dividend returns a share of ad revenue to the people whose attention produced it, this prices the externality of capturing that attention at all. A working paper — scope to be confirmed from the full text.

December 2025

2 entries

— Dec 2025

Regulation·US House of Representatives

Auchincloss introduces the Education Not Endless Scrolling Act — a digital ad tax

Rep. Jake Auchincloss (MA-04), with co-sponsor Rep. Maggie Goodlander, introduced a bill to levy a 50% excise tax on digital advertising revenue above $2.5bn and route the proceeds to one-on-one tutoring, vocational-technical schools, and local journalism. Auchincloss frames platforms as "attention fracking" children and treating youth "like products, not people," pitching the measure as part of an "UnAnxious Generation" package.

Why we logged it. The closest thing in live US legislation to the Conversion Dividend — it accepts that advertising revenue is built on extracted attention and proposes returning a declared share of it to the public. Caveat: it routes the money to public goods rather than to the people whose attention produced it, and remains a single bill at introduction stage with no clear path to passage.

— Dec 2025

Research·Psychological Bulletin

Feeds, Feelings, and Focus — a meta-analysis of short-form video use

Lan Nguyen and colleagues (Griffith University) pool 71 studies and 98,299 participants and find heavier short-form-video use moderately associated with poorer cognition — the strongest effects for attention and inhibitory control — and weakly with poorer mental health, including anxiety, stress, and sleep disturbance. Notably, addiction-scale measures of compulsive use predicted harm more strongly than time-on-app alone.

Why we logged it. The largest synthesis yet behind the claim that the engagement-optimised feed degrades the very faculty it harvests — attention. Caveat: the associations are correlational, and most of the underlying studies are cross-sectional, so causation is unproven.

In press 2026

3 entries

— In press 2026

Research·American Journal of Preventive Medicine

Problematic social media use trajectories are linked with lower cognitive performance in adolescents

Drawing on the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development cohort, this analysis links trajectories of problematic social media use — the compulsive, conflict-generating pattern, as distinct from raw hours — with lower cognitive performance in adolescents: impaired attention, reduced working memory, diminished executive functioning. It extends the JAMA trajectory work from October 2025 by shifting the exposure from time spent to the compulsion itself.

Why we logged it. The harm tracks the grip, not the minutes — the variable that matters is the one engagement design optimises for. Caveat: logged from the abstract; the publisher page would not render at logging time, so details await the full text.

— In press 2026

Research·Information, Communication & Society

Problematic social media use and adolescent mental well-being: socioeconomic inequalities across 35 countries

Roughly 145,000 adolescents across 35 countries in the WHO-linked Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study: problematic social media use is consistently associated with more psychological complaints and lower life satisfaction — and the association is stronger for low-SES adolescents than high-SES ones, especially on life satisfaction. A companion analysis appears in the World Happiness Report 2026.

Why we logged it. The distributional claim made empirical: the attention tax is regressive. The people with the least material buffer pay the most in wellbeing terms for the same extraction. Caveat: cross-sectional survey waves (2018 and 2022) and self-reported use.

— In press 2026

Research·Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 179

Fournier et al. — Attention hijacked: how social media notifications disrupt cognitive processing

A Lyon team ran a Stroop task on 180 university students while delivering notifications, and measured a transient cognitive slowdown of roughly seven seconds per ping, driven by perceptual salience, learned association, and inferred social relevance. Crucially, the magnitude was predicted by interaction frequency — notification volume and checking behaviour — not by total screen time.

Why we logged it. A measurement of the tax in milliseconds, and a pivot from "time on device" to "interruptions per device" as the design lever that matters.

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