Our Moral Board · Influence portrait
Charles Jones and Christopher Tonetti
An influence portrait of Jones and Tonetti’s joint research on data’s nonrival character, privacy, ownership, market structure, and the social gains and risks of broader data use.
Their analysis gives the Internet of Value a precise economic tension: data can be reused without being depleted, yet reuse can collide with privacy, concentrated ownership, and weak consent.
Influence portrait
An idea can shape a lineage. It cannot hold a human identity.
Provenance
sourced factCharles I. Jones and Christopher Tonetti published their joint paper in the American Economic Review in 2020 after circulating it through the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Core ideas
sourced factData is nonrival because multiple firms can use the same data simultaneously. This creates potential social gains from broad use, but also raises questions about privacy, ownership, market power, hoarding, and incentives.
Moral themes
editorial interpretationThe work makes visible a conflict between collective benefit and personal exposure: economic reuse cannot by itself justify stripping people of meaningful authority over data about them.
Defining influence
editorial interpretationFor Moses, nonrivalry clarifies why data cannot be governed exactly like a depleted physical good, while the paper’s ownership analysis keeps privacy and incentives inside the economic model.
Tensions and critique
sourced factThe authors’ model finds potential gains from consumer data rights and broad reuse, but its result is model-dependent and does not settle legal, political, collective, or power questions surrounding data governance.
Relationship to the Internet of Value
editorial interpretationThe research is an economic influence, not an IoV data-governance rule. It sharpens questions about consent, portability, reuse, privacy, and who captures gains from information that can serve many contexts at once.
Source ledger