ABSTRACT
The digital economy can be defined as “the pervasive use of IT (hardware, software, applications and telecommunications) in all aspects of the economy” (Atkinson and McKay 2007: 7). Therefore, it must not be confused with the information economy or the knowledge economy, although all three have evolved rapidly and simultaneously since the end of the twentieth century. But the links between the evolution of technology and the rise of a global digital society should not be underestimated. There is an economics of digitized information whose basics fundamentally explain the features of the whole information-based economy. Digitalization allows tradability and scalability of business information and changes its value as an economic good, since it can be stored, retrieved, duplicated, and communicated at very low cost.
