The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition
Jan 18th 2018
NOT long ago, being the boss of a big Western tech firm was a dream job. As the billions rolled in, so did the plaudits: Google, Facebook, Amazon and others were making the world a better place. Today these companies are accused of being BAADD—big, anti-competitive, addictive and destructive to democracy. Regulators fine them, politicians grill them and one-time backers warn of their power to cause harm.
Much of this techlash is misguided. The presumption that big businesses must necessarily be wicked is plain wrong.Apple is to be admired as the world’s most valuable listed company for the simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing fierce competition. Many online services would be worse if their providers were smaller. Evidence for the link between smartphones and unhappiness is weak.Fake news is not only an online phenomenon.
plaudits: strong approval
以前，做西方巨头公司的大boss 是一件好差事，几十亿的销售额滚滚而来，荣誉和肯定随机而至。但现在这些大公司被认为是： 大， 垄断，致瘾， 破坏民主！
But big tech platforms, particularly Facebook, Google and Amazon, do indeed raise a worry about fair competition.That is partly because they often benefit from legal exemptions. Unlike publishers, Facebook and Google are rarely held responsible for what users do on them; and for years most American buyers on Amazon did not pay sales tax.Nor do the Titans simply compete in a market. Increasingly, they are the market itself, providing the infrastructure (or “platforms”) for much of the digital economy. Many of their services appear to be free, but users “pay” for them by giving away their data. Powerful though they already are, their huge stockmarket valuations suggest that investors are counting on them to double or even triple in size in the next decade.
There is thus a justified fear that the tech titans will use their power to protect and extend their dominance, to the detriment of consumers (see article). The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling innovation.
detriment: something that will cause damage or injury to something or someone
大家都在担心，这些寡头公司缺少竞争，而且像google 和 facebook 很少为他们顾客的行为负责，亚马逊上很多商家都多年未缴税...
The less severe contest
The platforms have become so dominant because they benefit from “network effects”. Size begets size: the more sellers Amazon, say, can attract, the more buyers will shop there, which attracts more sellers, and so on. By some estimates, Amazon captures over 40% of online shopping in America. With more than 2bn monthly users, Facebook holds sway over the media industry. Firms cannot do without Google, which in some countries processes more than 90% of web searches. Facebook and Google control two-thirds of America’s online ad revenues.
America’s trustbusters have given tech giants the benefit of the doubt. They look for consumer harm, which is hard to establish when prices are falling and services are “free”. The firms themselves stress that a giant-killing startup is just a click away and that they could be toppled by a new technology, such as the blockchain. Before Google and Facebook, Alta Vista and MySpace were the bee’s knees. Who remembers them?
beget: to cause something to happen or exist
Violence begets more violence.
topple: to cause something to become unsteady and fall
像google 和 facebook 等公司说 一些新技术公司也会给他们带来毁灭性的打击，像区块链技术。Alta Vista和Myspace以前也是行业翘楚，现在谁还记得它们？
bee's knees: an excellent person and thing
However, the barriers to entry are rising. Facebook not only owns the world’s largest pool of personal data, but also its biggest “social graph”—the list of its members and how they are connected. Amazon has more pricing information than any other firm. Voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, will give them even more control over how people experience the internet. China’s tech firms have the heft to compete, but are not about to get unfettered access to Western consumers.
If this trend runs its course, consumers will suffer as the tech industry becomes less vibrant. Less money will go into startups, most good ideas will be bought up by the Titans and, one way or another, the profits will be captured by the giants.
The early signs are already visible. The European Commission has accused Google of using control of Android, its mobile operating system, to give its own apps a leg up. Facebook keeps buying firms which could one day lure users away: first Instagram, then WhatsApp and most recently tbh, an app that lets teenagers send each other compliments anonymously. Although Amazon is still increasing competition in aggregate, as industries from groceries to television can attest, it can also spot rivals and squeeze them from the market.
unfettered: not controlled or restricted
unfettered = free access
但现在新的公司准入门槛已经很高了，facebook拥有全球最大的用户数据，亚马逊有最
多的定价信息，他们的语音助手让用户有更好的体验。这样就会使钱更少地流向新公司，当然更多的利润就被这些巨头公司瓜分！
facebook不断地在并购那些有朝一日能卷走用户的公司，先是Instagram，再来Whatsapp，现在是tbh（一款让用户匿名给其他用户好评的软件？）
The rivalry remedy
What to do? In the past, societies have tackled monopolies either by breaking them up, as with Standard Oil in 1911, or by regulating them as a public utility, as with AT&T; in 1913. Today both those approaches have big drawbacks. The traditional tools of utilities regulation, such as price controls and profit caps, are hard to apply, since most products are free and would come at a high price in forgone investment and innovation. Likewise, a full-scale break-up would cripple the platforms’ economies of scale, worsening the service they offer consumers. And even then, in all likelihood one of the Googlettes or Facebabies would eventually sweep all before it as the inexorable logic of network effects reasserted itself.
The lack of a simple solution deprives politicians of easy slogans, but does not leave trustbusters impotent. Two broad changes of thinking would go a long way towards sensibly taming the Titans. The first is to make better use of existing competition law.Trustbusters should scrutinise mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to neutralise a potential long-term threat, even if the target is small at the time. Such scrutiny might have prevented Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Google’s of Waze, which makes navigation software. To ensure that the platforms do not favour their own products, oversight groups could be set up to deliberate on complaints from rivals—a bit like the independent “technical committee” created by the antitrust case against Microsoft in 2001. Immunity to content liability must go, too.
tame: to make something less wild or difficult wto control: to bring something under control
怎么办呢？过去处理垄断企业的方法要么就是“打碎”它们，让它们变小，要么就是规范它们，但这些方法都有重大的缺陷...
Second, trustbusters need to think afresh about how tech markets work. A central insight, one increasingly discussed among economists and regulators, is that personal data are the currency in which customers actually buy services. Through that prism, the tech titans receive valuable information—on their users’ behaviour, friends and purchasing habits—in return for their products. Just as America drew up sophisticated rules about intellectual property in the 19th century, so it needs a new set of laws to govern the ownership and exchange of data, with the aim of giving solid rights to individuals.
In essence this means giving people more control over their information. If a user so desires, key data should be made available in real time to other firms—as banks in Europe are now required to do with customers’ account information. Regulators could oblige platform firms to make anonymised bulk data available to competitors, in return for a fee, a bit like the compulsory licensing of a patent. Such data-sharing requirements could be calibrated to firms’ size: the bigger platforms are, the more they have to share. These mechanisms would turn data from something titans hoard, to suppress competition, into something users share, to foster innovation.
hoard: a large amount of something valuable that is kept hidden(前面文章有出现过）
政策制定者可以让这些公司必须把这些数据匿名地分享到某个平台，这样它数据越大，分享的就越多。这种机制可以使这些大量隐藏的数据（制胜法宝） 变成了大家可以一起用的，来刺激更多创新企业涌现...
None of this will be simple, but it would tame the titans without wrecking the gains they have brought. Users would find it easier to switch between services. Upstart competitors would have access to some of the data that larger firms hold and thus be better equipped to grow to maturity without being gobbled up. And shareholders could no longer assume monopoly profits for decades to come.
所有这些都不会很简单，但确实限制了寡头的同时没有损害它们的利益。用户也可以有更多的选择，换不同的服务或产品。新来的竞争者也可以利用这些寡头已经拥有的数据，去更好地发展避免被吞噬。最重要的就是股东们不用盼望着想靠垄断来迎来黄金利润的几十年
总结：西方国家都在反垄断的路上越走越远，中国的企业该怎么走呢？腾讯，阿里巴巴，百度们，都特别有趣！
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Results
Lexile®Measure: 1100L - 1200L
Mean Sentence Length: 15.98
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.18
Word Count: 1128
这篇文章的蓝思值是在1100-1200L， 适合英语专业大二的水平学习，是经济学人里普通难度
这篇文章的蓝思值是在1100-1200L， 适合英语专业大二的水平学习，是经济学人里普通难度
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