科技大公司正在顛覆資本主義的基本規(guī)則

Pressure has been growing in the past few weeks for politicians and regulators to clamp down on the monopoly power of Big Tech. In a speech given in Washington DC on September 12, Maureen Ohlhausen, the acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission in the US, tried to pour cold water on the idea. “Given the clear consumer benefits of technology-driven innovation,” she said. “I am concerned about the push to adopt an approach that will disregard consumer benefits in the pursuit of other, perhaps even conflicting, goals.”

過去幾周，要求政界人士和監(jiān)管者遏制科技巨頭壟斷力量的壓力不斷加大。在9月12日的一場演講中，美國聯(lián)邦貿(mào)易委員會(Federal Trade Commission)代理主席莫琳•奧爾豪森(Maureen Ohlhausen)試圖給這一構想潑冷水。“考慮到技術驅動的創(chuàng)新為消費者帶來的明顯好處，”她說。“我對這方面的壓力感到擔憂，它將無視消費者的利益，而去追求其他、甚至可能相互沖突的目標。”

Her words echo US antitrust policy of the past 40 years: if companies bring down prices for consumers, they can be as big and as powerful, economically and politically, as they want to be. This hugely favours companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, which offer up services and products, from search results to self-publishing platforms, that are not just cheap, but free.

她的話呼應了過去40年來美國的反壟斷政策：如果企業(yè)為消費者降低了價格，它們在經(jīng)濟和政治層面無論多么龐大和強大都沒問題。這對谷歌(Google)、Facebook及亞馬遜(Amazon)這樣的公司非常有利，這些公司提供從搜索結果到個人出版平臺的服務和產(chǎn)品，不僅便宜，而且免費。

Yet Ms Ohlhausen is overlooking a key point: free is not free when you consider that we are not paying for these services in dollars, but in data, including everything from our credit card numbers to shopping records, to political choices and medical histories. How valuable is that personal data?

然而，奧爾豪森忽視了關鍵的一點：免費并不真的意味著免費——當你考慮到盡管我們沒有用美元為這些服務付費，卻在用數(shù)據(jù)付費，包括各種數(shù)據(jù)，從我們的信用卡號到購物記錄，從政治選擇到病歷。這些個人數(shù)據(jù)的價值有多高?

It is a question of growing interest to everyone from economists to artists. For example, at Datenmarkt, an art installation cum grocery store set up in Hamburg in 2014, a can of fruit sold for five Facebook photos; a pack of toast for eight “likes” and so on.

從經(jīng)濟學家到藝術家，各方都對這個問題越來越感興趣。例如，在2014年成立的漢堡裝置藝術雜貨店Datenmarkt，一罐水果的“售價”是5張Facebook照片;一袋吐司值8個“贊”，等等。

The bottom line is that it is almost impossible to put an exact price on personal data, in part because people have widely varying behaviours and ideas about how likely they are to part with it, depending on how offers are posed. In one recent study, when consumers were asked straight out whether they would consent to being tracked by a brand name digital media firm in exchange for being targeted with more “useful” advertising, four-fifths said no. Yet another study published this year by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University shows how pathetically little incentive is required to convince people to give up their entire email contact list. Students in the study were far more likely to do it if offered a free pizza.

關鍵的問題在于，精確定價個人數(shù)據(jù)幾乎是不可能的，部分原因是，對于自己有多大可能會交出這些信息，人們表現(xiàn)出千差萬別的行為和想法，取決于對方給出的交換條件。在最近的一項研究中，當消費者被直截了當?shù)貑柕?，是否同意接受一家知名?shù)字媒體公司的追蹤，以換取更為“有用的”廣告時，五分之四的人都表示拒絕。然而，麻省理工學院(MIT)和斯坦福大學(Stanford University)的研究人員今年發(fā)表的另一項研究顯示，只需要微不足道的一點激勵，就能說服人們交出整個郵件聯(lián)絡人名單。如果提供一個免費比薩，接受研究的很多學生就很有可能這么做。

One might argue that this is simply the market working as it should. Consumers were given a choice, and they made it. And whether or not it was a bad one is not for us to judge.

有人也許辯稱，這只是市場在發(fā)揮其應有的作用。消費者得到了一個選擇，他們也做出了選擇。至于這個選擇是否明智，根本不是我們要評判的事情。

But as the latter study also showed, companies can nudge users to part with data more freely by telling them it will be protected by technology designed to “keep the prying eyes of everyone from governments to internet service providers . . . from seeing the content of messages”. In fact, the encryption technology in question could not guarantee this.

但后一項研究還表明，企業(yè)能夠鼓動用戶更自在地交出數(shù)據(jù)——只要告訴他們，他們的數(shù)據(jù)會受到技術保護，而這些技術的設計初衷就是“防止包括從政府到互聯(lián)網(wǎng)服務提供商在內(nèi)的所有人……窺探通訊內(nèi)容。”事實上，他們所用的加密技術并不能保證這一點。

The bottom line is that big data tilts the playing field decisively in favour of the largest digital players themselves. They can extract information and plant suggestions there that will lead us to entirely different decisions, which results in ever more profit for them.

關鍵是大數(shù)據(jù)使整個競爭格局明顯對那些最大的數(shù)字企業(yè)自己有利。他們可以提取信息并在其中植入建議，引導我們做出截然不同的決定，最終給這些公司帶來越來越多的利潤。

Not only is that too much power for any one company to have, it is anti-competitive and market-distorting in the sense that the basic rules of capitalism as we know it are being overturned. There is no equal access to market information in this scenario. There is certainly no price transparency.

這不僅讓一家公司擁有太多力量，而且是反競爭和扭曲市場的，從這個意義上講，我們所知的資本主義的基本規(guī)則正在被顛覆。在這種情形下，各方?jīng)]有平等獲取市場信息的機會?？隙ú淮嬖趦r格透明性。

The personal data we give away so freely are being lavishly monetised by the richest companies on the planet (Facebook’s second-quarter operating margin, for example, was 47.2 per cent). They get their raw material (our data) more or less for free, then charge retailers and advertisers for it, who then pass those costs on to us in one form or another — a dollar more for that glass of wine at the bistro you found via a search, say. They have a licence to print money, without many of the restrictions, in terms of all sorts of corporate liability, that other industries have to grapple with.

我們?nèi)绱穗S意交出的個人數(shù)據(jù)正在被全球最富有的公司(例如Facebook，今年第二季度的營業(yè)利潤率達47.2%)大規(guī)模地貨幣化。它們差不多免費獲取原材料(我們的數(shù)據(jù))，然后據(jù)此向零售商和廣告商收取費用，后兩者再將這些成本以某種形式轉嫁到我們身上——比如，你在搜索到的小酒館喝一杯酒時多付出的一美元。他們有“印鈔許可證”，就各種各樣的公司責任而言，不必承受其他行業(yè)不得不應對的諸多制約。

These companies are not so much innovators as “attention merchants”, to borrow a phrase from Columbia University law school professor Tim Wu. Economists have yet to put good figures on their net effect on productivity and gross domestic product growth. Surely it is high. Yet any tally would also have to include the competition costs as these firms devour competitors and reshape the 21st-century economy to suit themselves.

借用哥倫比亞大學(Columbia University)法學院吳修銘(Tim Wu)教授的說法，與其說這些企業(yè)是創(chuàng)新者，不如說他們是“注意力商人”(attention merchants)。經(jīng)濟學家還未就這些企業(yè)對生產(chǎn)率和國內(nèi)生產(chǎn)總值(GDP)增長的凈效應估測出樂觀數(shù)字。這些數(shù)字肯定會很高。然而，任何這樣的計算都必須納入競爭成本，因為這些公司會吞沒競爭對手，以適合自己的方式重塑21世紀經(jīng)濟。

Whatever the FTC might say now, there are a growing number of legal cases that could change the ground rules for Big Tech. While American antitrust law has been based on very literal interpretations of the 1890 Sherman Act, lawmakers in Europe take a broader approach. They are trying to gauge how multiple players in the economic ecosystem are being affected by the digital giants.

無論聯(lián)邦貿(mào)易委員會現(xiàn)在說什么，都有越來越多的司法案件可能改變針對大型科技公司的基本規(guī)則。雖然美國的反壟斷法律是基于對1890年《休曼法》(Sherman Act)的嚴格字面解釋，但歐洲立法者走得更遠。他們正試圖評估當下經(jīng)濟生態(tài)系統(tǒng)中的多個主體正如何受到這些數(shù)字巨擘的影響。

I am beginning to wonder if we should not all have a more explicit right not only to control how our data are used, but to any economic value created from them. When wealth lives mainly in intellectual property, it is hard to imagine how else the maths will work. We are living in a brave new world, with an entirely new currency. It will require creative thinking — economically, legally and politically — to ensure it does not become a winner-takes-all society.

我開始納悶，我們是不是都該擁有更明確的權利——不僅控制我們的數(shù)據(jù)如何被使用，還要對這些數(shù)據(jù)創(chuàng)造的任何經(jīng)濟價值享有權益。在財富主要依托知識產(chǎn)權的時代，很難想象還能有什么別的數(shù)學計算邏輯。我們生活在一個狂野新世界，使用一種全新的“貨幣”。這個世界將需要創(chuàng)造性思維——經(jīng)濟上、法律上和政治上——以確保其不會變成一個贏家通吃的社會。

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譯者/何黎