The 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. What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed web of its users’ friendships and social lives.
数字经济中，寡头的能量和野心令人咋舌——亚马逊刚刚宣布了以135亿美元收购了高档连锁超市 Whole Foods，而两年前 Facebook 支付甚至超过亚马逊收购 Whole Foods 的价格收购了 WhatsApp 的消息服务。而要知道：WhatsApp 完全没有任何实体产品。WhatsApp 能给 Facebook 提供的是复杂和精细化的用户朋友圈和社交生活圈。
Facebook 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. Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be. What 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? It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the 460 shops ft owns, but the records of which customers have purchased what.
Facebook 承诺欧盟委员会不会将电话号码与 Facebook 用户的身份相关联，但当交易一达成，它就违背了诺言。尽管不知道消息的内容，但是人们还是可能会知道消息的推送者以及被推送者，而且可能会愈演愈烈。政治记者和党鞭就不想知道 WhatsApp 组群中，特蕾莎·梅的敌人现在正在密谋着什么吗？Whole Foods 对于亚马逊的价值可能不在于它拥有的460家商店，而是记录了那些顾客购买了什么。
Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. Competition 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. The users of their services are not their customers. That 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.
竞争法似乎是解决这些权力不平衡的唯一途径，但好像效果不佳。一方面，与数字经济的变化速度相比，它非常缓慢。一个问题刚得到解决和纠正时，在市场上消失，新的权力滥用又出现了。但还有一个更深层次的概念问题。竞争法目前被定义来处理消费者的经济损失，而当这些服务的用户不为这些服务买单时，它的作用就不明显。这些服务的使用者并不是用户，而是从 Facebook 和 Google 购买广告的那些人。两个虚拟巨头把持着所有的数字广告。而在这一点上，其他的媒体和娱乐公司无法与二者比肩。
The product they’re selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just 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. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn’t feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.
他们出售的产品是数据，而我们这些用户，将我们的生活转化为数据的形式，这会使那些数字巨头收益。正如蚂蚁会牧养蚜虫以取得它们喜欢吃的甘蜜，Google 也会牧养我们以取得通过我们的数码生活产生的数据。蚂蚁保持蚜虫进食的地方不受捕食性昆虫的侵扰；Gmail不让垃圾邮件进入我们的收件箱。即使双方都受益，这种关系也很难被形容成一种人类或民主的关系。
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