❶The power and ambition of the giants of the digital economy is astonishing—Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn, but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn't have any physical product at all.❷What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed web of its users' friendships and social lives.
❶Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. ❷Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be.❸What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May's enemies are currently plotting?❹It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the 460 shops it owns, but the records of which customers have purchased what.
❶Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power.❷But it is clumsy. ❷For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy.❹By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power.❺But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. ❷Competition law as presently /interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don't pay for them.❼The users of their services are not their customers. ❽That would be the people who buy advertising from them— and Facebook and Google, the two virtual giants, dominate digital advertising to the disadvantage of all other media and entertainment companies.
❶The product they're selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. ❷Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids for the honeydew they produce when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives yield.❸Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes.❹It doesn't feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.
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数字经济巨头的势力和野心非常惊 人——亚马逊刚刚宣布以135亿美元的价格 收购高端食品连锁店全食超市，而两年前脸 书甚至以更高的价格收购了瓦次普通信服务， 这一服务并没有任何实体产品。(31 )它提 供给脸书的是一个复杂且极其精细的信息网 络，其中包含了瓦次普用户的朋友圏和社交 生活网。 当时，脸书向欧盟委员会承诺不会将电 话号码与脸书用户的身份信息绑定，但交易 一达成，脸书就食言了。(32)即使不知道 信息的具体内容，但是发送者以及接收者的 信息在很大程度上也会被泄露，并且现在可 能仍是这种情况。特蕾莎・梅的政敌正在进 行密谋的那些瓦次普聊天群，有哪个政治记 者或党鞭不想知道其成员构成？对亚马逊来 说，全食超市的价值也许并不在于它所拥有 的460家店铺，而在于其客户的购买记录。 竞争法似乎是解决这些权力不平衡问题 的唯_途径。(33)但其不够灵活。一方面， 与数字经济的变化速度相比，它的发展非常 軽匚待一个问题得到解决和补救时，它可 能已经在市场中不复存在，取代它的是新的 权力滥用。但还存在一个更深层次的概念性 问题。(34 )正如目前所解读的那样，竞争 法处理的是消费者经济受损的问题，而当享 受这些服务的用户不支付费用时，该法的 效力就不明显了。享受这些服务的用户并 非他们的客户。购买广告的人才是他们的客 户——而脸书和谷歌这两家虚拟巨头主宰着 数字广告行业，致使所有其他的媒体和娱乐 公司处于劣势地位。 数字巨头销售的产品是数据，而我们这 些用户将自己的生活信息转换为数据，让他 们受益。（35 ）正如一些蚂蚁养殖一种名为 财虫的小虫子，以获取它们在进食时产生的 蜜露一样，谷歌为我们提供服务也是为了得 到我们的数字化生活所产生的数据。蚂蚁不 让捕食性昆虫靠近场虫进食的地方，谷歌邮 箱帮我们拦截垃圾邮件。即使双方都能从中 受益，这也不像是一种有人性的或民主的 关系。 ■