§ 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 8 June 2026

Forthcoming 2026

1 entry

1 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.

June 2026

2 entries

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

8 entries

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.

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

2 entries

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

1 entry

— 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

1 entry

— 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.

The chronicle is curated by The Editors and updated on Mondays and Thursdays. Submissions of regulatory rulings, peer-reviewed work, and primary documents are read on a rolling basis at submissions@timetax.info. Selection criteria — first-hand sources where possible, links that work, claims described as narrowly as the source warrants.

The longer-form annotated library lives at Evidence. The framework lives at Glossary. The policy proposal lives at Dividend.