Sunday, July 13, 2014

New "Information Markets" Raise Issues

Increasingly, information about products gets intertwined with the actual products, raising new legal and ethical issues. MonkeyParking, for example, is an app that allows people who are parked to alert out drivers that they are about to pull out of a spot, and allows those other drivers to bid on the right to take the vacated parking spot.



You can see the issue: such apps create new information markets whose value lies in the procurement of physical goods, such as parking spaces. 



At the heart of the dispute over these services is whether apps should be able to use a public asset to make a profit. The app developers of course argue it is information about parking, not parking, that is the foundation for the business. 

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