This allowed companies like Google to capture the “states” or series of events that users left as a function of their search index just as Amazon did with its sales index and Facebook with its social index, enabling them to monetize user actions, attention, and behavior. This caused trillions of dollars of value to consolidate around the application or logic tier and the service providers that enabled it. Users did not receive any of the commercial value they contributed to the network, nor were the developers of the web itself able to meaningfully monetize their creation.
