How the net changes social and economic practices,

Obvious you would think?

Adrian Monck flags up a good piece by Tom Steinberg writing at MySociety who questions the government's digital strategy.

While it has focused on getting people online,protecting people against its bad points and promoting itself though websites etc they have missed some crucial points

The main one being its economic impact.

He writes that the medium

changes social and economic practices,technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

adding that services such as google

are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion.

He ends by suggesting five ways in which the government can contribute in a positive way.You can read all five on the post but I will repeat these

1.Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves

2.Seize the opportunity to bring people together.