A position I've come to via free markets is public information.<p>If you look at economic inefficiency, a lot of models depend on some kind of information problem, eg the famous lemon cars.<p>Consequently, I think far more of how society works should be made public:<p>- Actual incomes from various sources. Maybe anonymize it, but I've looked up my Norwegian friends' incomes and it hasn't caused a revolution or an epidemic of kidnappings yet. X person is a doctor, he needs a 10 year degree to do that, he get paid £120k, he gets this much pension, these are his working hours. Again, as you grow up you find out some of this but it's very not easy to find, especially when you're deciding.<p>- Actual business models. "We provide a search engine, where we dynamically auction off advertising space, it makes x amount of money, and we thin y and z are critical to our profitability. Here's book about how it works." To some degree we know this about certain large businesses, but apart from the huge firms whose models have Ben Thompson writing about them, it's not actually that easy. It should be easy for everyone who's graduated high school to find out how the largest 10k firms in the country operate, so that people can think about how to improve things.<p>- Actual business models, part 2. "We make x millions from y thousand widgets, which we sell to these people. Our suppliers are these firms, and we paid this much to them." Which again is one of those things where you can say "Google pays Apple to be default" but I also want to know if there's some other relationship that maybe I could get my company into. Or it may be that there's some social negative such as monopoly that we want to know sooner rather than later.<p>- A who-owns-what database that doesn't have anonymizing entities in it. How will we know how society works if we don't have this? There's no way to know who has an interest in what without this. Again, you can say "kidnappings" but there's got to be some middle ground here. It's also a bit strange for society's major legal invention, property law, to work in favor of people when they ask for it, but the rest of the time society doesn't know who it is protecting. I'm no expert but you'd think a sane system would say "so-and-so owns this land, and in exchange for a bit of tax we'll make sure they can use it as they see fit".<p>- Government needs to be transparent. People already believe this, it's just quite hard and boring to get done. But for instance David Cameron trying to lobby his old mates, it's a great thing that we can see it.<p>As for this specific article, the interesting thing is that if ads were traded on a security market, a whole can of worms would be opened. We discovered a long time ago that it's bad to favor certain participants, so some stringent rules were put in place regarding fairness. But if I make a market for some other thing and behave the same way, it's not nearly as serious. I mean sure maybe they'll get done for this, but will it be proportional to the harm? Write to me when they're broken up, as the LSE would be if they made a principal business that front-runs the customers.