It was more a spiritual equivalent of a consumer society - everybody doing their own thing.
Going forward, every product page will get a meter detailing these data points, and Bensadon says that he hopes this barometer will become the equivalent of a consumer report snapshot.
Today, there is effectively no equivalent for consumer finance.
The device marks the next major step for the company, which entered the world three years ago this month as a Kickstarter campaign designed to bring a circuit board milling machine to hardware developers' desktops – a sort of milling equivalent to consumer-facing 3D printers.
Currently, provider-side accountability is also the basis for cloud service providers, although, as yet there are no equivalent facilities of consumer-trusted metering; rather, consumers have no choice but to take whatever usage data made available by the provider as trustworthy.
In any case, however, for now it looks like whatever Amazon brings to the table in terms of its own software is there to complement, not cannibalise, services that work over AWS, which the company has been building out as an extensive marketplace for third-party business software providers, the enterprise equivalent of Amazon's consumer e-commerce marketplace.
It's the equivalent of thinking that consumers choose a vacation destination by making analytical trade-offs of all the places they could go, and then selecting the best mathematical outcome.
"Should Scotland become independent, it would be more expensive to achieve a level of consumer protection equivalent to that which currently exists," the report says.
Is there the consumer equivalent of an undecided voter?
It would have taken the consumer equivalent of the Russian Revolution to keep "The Phantom Menace" from ruling the box office for weeks.
Are they exhausted by the consumer equivalent of the brain fatigue -- information overload -- that is caused by a constant updates of devices and online media?
