How to tame the tech titans

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.

不久前，一家大型西方科技公司的老板是一份梦寐以求的工作。随着钱财和喝彩滚滚而来，谷歌、Facebook、亚马逊和其他公司正在将世界变得更好。如今，这些公司被指责为“BAADD”，即“大”、“反竞争”、“上瘾”和“破坏民主”。监管机构对他们进行罚款，政客们对他们进行盘问，而一次性的支持者则警告说，他们的权力有可能造成伤害。

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.

这种技术的大部分是被误导的。认为大企业必定是邪恶的假设是完全错误的。苹果被视为世界上最有价值的上市公司，原因很简单，因为它制作了人们想买东西，即使面临激烈的竞争。如果供应商规模较小，许多在线服务将会变得更糟。智能手机与不快乐之间的联系的证据很弱。假新闻不仅是一种网络现象。

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.

但大型科技平台，尤其是Facebook、谷歌和亚马逊，确实对公平竞争产生了担忧。这在一定程度上是因为他们经常从法律豁免中受益。与出版商不同的是，Facebook和谷歌很少对用户的行为负责;多年来，大多数在亚马逊上的美国买家都没有缴纳营业税。这些巨头也不只是在市场上竞争。它们越来越多地成为市场本身，为大部分数字经济提供基础设施(或“平台”)。他们的许多服务似乎是免费的，但用户通过免费提供数据来“支付”他们的费用。尽管他们已经很强大了，但他们巨大的股市估值表明，投资者正指望他们在未来10年的规模翻倍甚至三倍。

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. The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling innovation.

因此，人们有理由担心，科技巨头将利用自己的权力来保护和扩大自己的统治地位，从而损害消费者利益。对于政策制定者来说，棘手的任务是在不过度抑制创新的情况下约束他们。

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.

这些平台之所以如此占主导地位，是因为它们得益于“网络效应”。规模产生规模:亚马逊吸引越多的卖家，越多的买家会在那里购物，这又会吸引更多的卖家，等等。据估计，亚马逊在美国的在线购物超过了40%。Facebook拥有超过20亿的月度用户，在媒体行业占据着主导地位。如果没有谷歌，公司就无法运行。在一些国家，谷歌的网络搜索量超过了90%。Facebook和谷歌控制了美国在线广告收入的三分之二。

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?

美国的反托拉斯者给科技巨头们带来了好处。他们寻找的是消费者的伤害，当价格下降，服务是“免费”的时候很难建立。这些公司自己也强调，具有巨大杀伤力的初创公司在弹指之间，就能被一项新技术推翻，比如区块链。在谷歌和Facebook之前，Alta Vista和MySpace都是出类拔萃的，谁还记得他们吗?

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.

然而，准入门槛正在上升。Facebook不仅拥有世界上最大的个人数据库，而且还拥有它最大的“社交图谱”——它的成员列表以及它们之间的联系方式。亚马逊的定价信息比其他任何公司都要多。像亚马逊的“Alexa”和谷歌的“助手”这样的语音助手，将会让他们掌握更多人们在互联网上的体验。中国的科技公司有参与竞争的实力，但它们并不打算无限制的接触西方消费者。

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.

如果这一趋势持续下去，随着科技行业变得不那么活跃，消费者将会受到影响。更少的资金会投入到创业公司中，大多数好的创意都将被这些巨头收购，不管怎样，这些公司的利润都将被巨头们收购。

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.

早期的迹象已经很明显了。欧盟委员会指责谷歌利用其移动操作系统Android的控制权，给自己的应用提供便利帮助。Facebook一直在收购那些有一天会吸引用户的公司:先是Instagram，然后是WhatsApp，还有最近的tbh，这是一款让青少年互相匿名问候的应用。尽管从杂货到电视等行业，亚马逊仍在不断增加竞争，但它也能发现竞争对手，并将他们从市场中挤出。

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.

要做什么吗?在过去，社会已经通过打破垄断来解决垄断问题，比如1911年的标准石油，或者将它们作为公共设施加以规范，就像1913年的AT&T那样。如今，这两种方法都有很大的缺陷。传统的公用事业监管工具，如价格控制和利润上限，很难应用，因为大多数产品都是免费的，而且在投资和创新方面会付出高昂的代价。同样地，全面的拆分将会削弱平台的规模经济，恶化他们为消费者提供的服务。即便如此，类似于谷歌或facebook的公司，最终还是会横扫一切，因为网络效应的不可阻挡的逻辑再次证明了自己的存在。

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.

缺乏简单的解决方案使政客们失去了简单的口号，但却不能让反托拉斯者变得无能。两种思维方式的广泛改变会使驯服巨头路途漫漫。第一是更好地利用现有的竞争法。反托拉斯检察官应该仔细审查合并，以判断一项交易是否可能消除潜在的长期威胁，即使目标在当时是很小的。这样的审查可能阻止了Facebook收购Instagram和谷歌收购Waze，后者是一款导航软件。为了确保平台不偏向于他们自己的产品，监督小组可以从竞争对手的角度蓄意投诉——有点像2001年反垄断案件中针对微软的独立“技术委员会”。对内容责任的豁免权也必须取缔。

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.

其次，反托拉斯者需要重新思考科技市场是如何运作的。经济学家和监管者越来越多地讨论的一个核心观点是，个人数据是消费者实际购买服务的货币。通过这一棱镜，科技巨头们可以从用户的行为、朋友和购买习惯中获得有价值的信息，以换取他们的产品。正如美国在19世纪制定了关于知识产权的复杂规则，因此它需要一套新的法律来管理数据的所有权和交换，目的是给个人提供坚实的权利。

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.

从本质上说，这意味着让人们对他们的信息有更多的控制权。如果用户希望如此，关键数据应该实时提供给其他公司，正如欧洲的银行现对客户的账户信息要求对一样。监管机构可以要求平台公司向竞争对手提供匿名的批量数据，作为回报，这有点像专利的强制许可。这样的数据共享需求可以根据公司的规模做调整:更大的平台，他们需要分享的越多。这些机制将把来自于巨头囤积起来，用来以抑制竞争的数据，成为用户分享的东西，从而促进创新。

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.

这一切都不会简单，但它会驯服巨头，而不会破坏他们带来的收益。用户会发现在服务之间切换更容易。新兴的竞争对手可以获得一些大公司所持有的数据，从而更好地发展到成熟而不被吞并。在未来的几十年里，股东们再也不能承担垄断利润了。

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Taming the titans"

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.

不久前，一家大型西方科技公司的老板是一份梦寐以求的工作。随着钱财和喝彩滚滚而来，谷歌、Facebook、亚马逊和其他公司正在将世界变得更好。如今，这些公司被指责为“BAADD”，即“大”、“反竞争”、“上瘾”和“破坏民主”。监管机构对他们进行罚款，政客们对他们进行盘问，而一次性的支持者则警告说，他们的权力有可能造成伤害。

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.

这种技术的大部分是被误导的。认为大企业必定是邪恶的假设是完全错误的。苹果被视为世界上最有价值的上市公司，原因很简单，因为它制作了人们想买东西，即使面临激烈的竞争。如果供应商规模较小，许多在线服务将会变得更糟。智能手机与不快乐之间的联系的证据很弱。假新闻不仅是一种网络现象。

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.

但大型科技平台，尤其是Facebook、谷歌和亚马逊，确实对公平竞争产生了担忧。这在一定程度上是因为他们经常从法律豁免中受益。与出版商不同的是，Facebook和谷歌很少对用户的行为负责;多年来，大多数在亚马逊上的美国买家都没有缴纳营业税。这些巨头也不只是在市场上竞争。它们越来越多地成为市场本身，为大部分数字经济提供基础设施(或“平台”)。他们的许多服务似乎是免费的，但用户通过免费提供数据来“支付”他们的费用。尽管他们已经很强大了，但他们巨大的股市估值表明，投资者正指望他们在未来10年的规模翻倍甚至三倍。

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. The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling innovation.

因此，人们有理由担心，科技巨头将利用自己的权力来保护和扩大自己的统治地位，从而损害消费者利益。对于政策制定者来说，棘手的任务是在不过度抑制创新的情况下约束他们。

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.

这些平台之所以如此占主导地位，是因为它们得益于“网络效应”。规模产生规模:亚马逊吸引越多的卖家，越多的买家会在那里购物，这又会吸引更多的卖家，等等。据估计，亚马逊在美国的在线购物超过了40%。Facebook拥有超过20亿的月度用户，在媒体行业占据着主导地位。如果没有谷歌，公司就无法运行。在一些国家，谷歌的网络搜索量超过了90%。Facebook和谷歌控制了美国在线广告收入的三分之二。

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?

美国的反托拉斯者给科技巨头们带来了好处。他们寻找的是消费者的伤害，当价格下降，服务是“免费”的时候很难建立。这些公司自己也强调，具有巨大杀伤力的初创公司在弹指之间，就能被一项新技术推翻，比如区块链。在谷歌和Facebook之前，Alta Vista和MySpace都是出类拔萃的，谁还记得他们吗?

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.

然而，准入门槛正在上升。Facebook不仅拥有世界上最大的个人数据库，而且还拥有它最大的“社交图谱”——它的成员列表以及它们之间的联系方式。亚马逊的定价信息比其他任何公司都要多。像亚马逊的“Alexa”和谷歌的“助手”这样的语音助手，将会让他们掌握更多人们在互联网上的体验。中国的科技公司有参与竞争的实力，但它们并不打算无限制的接触西方消费者。

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.

如果这一趋势持续下去，随着科技行业变得不那么活跃，消费者将会受到影响。更少的资金会投入到创业公司中，大多数好的创意都将被这些巨头收购，不管怎样，这些公司的利润都将被巨头们收购。

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.

早期的迹象已经很明显了。欧盟委员会指责谷歌利用其移动操作系统Android的控制权，给自己的应用提供便利帮助。Facebook一直在收购那些有一天会吸引用户的公司:先是Instagram，然后是WhatsApp，还有最近的tbh，这是一款让青少年互相匿名问候的应用。尽管从杂货到电视等行业，亚马逊仍在不断增加竞争，但它也能发现竞争对手，并将他们从市场中挤出。

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.

要做什么吗?在过去，社会已经通过打破垄断来解决垄断问题，比如1911年的标准石油，或者将它们作为公共设施加以规范，就像1913年的AT&T那样。如今，这两种方法都有很大的缺陷。传统的公用事业监管工具，如价格控制和利润上限，很难应用，因为大多数产品都是免费的，而且在投资和创新方面会付出高昂的代价。同样地，全面的拆分将会削弱平台的规模经济，恶化他们为消费者提供的服务。即便如此，类似于谷歌或facebook的公司，最终还是会横扫一切，因为网络效应的不可阻挡的逻辑再次证明了自己的存在。

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.

缺乏简单的解决方案使政客们失去了简单的口号，但却不能让反托拉斯者变得无能。两种思维方式的广泛改变会使驯服巨头路途漫漫。第一是更好地利用现有的竞争法。反托拉斯检察官应该仔细审查合并，以判断一项交易是否可能消除潜在的长期威胁，即使目标在当时是很小的。这样的审查可能阻止了Facebook收购Instagram和谷歌收购Waze，后者是一款导航软件。为了确保平台不偏向于他们自己的产品，监督小组可以从竞争对手的角度蓄意投诉——有点像2001年反垄断案件中针对微软的独立“技术委员会”。对内容责任的豁免权也必须取缔。

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.

其次，反托拉斯者需要重新思考科技市场是如何运作的。经济学家和监管者越来越多地讨论的一个核心观点是，个人数据是消费者实际购买服务的货币。通过这一棱镜，科技巨头们可以从用户的行为、朋友和购买习惯中获得有价值的信息，以换取他们的产品。正如美国在19世纪制定了关于知识产权的复杂规则，因此它需要一套新的法律来管理数据的所有权和交换，目的是给个人提供坚实的权利。

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.

从本质上说，这意味着让人们对他们的信息有更多的控制权。如果用户希望如此，关键数据应该实时提供给其他公司，正如欧洲的银行现对客户的账户信息要求对一样。监管机构可以要求平台公司向竞争对手提供匿名的批量数据，作为回报，这有点像专利的强制许可。这样的数据共享需求可以根据公司的规模做调整:更大的平台，他们需要分享的越多。这些机制将把来自于巨头囤积起来，用来以抑制竞争的数据，成为用户分享的东西，从而促进创新。

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.

这一切都不会简单，但它会驯服巨头，而不会破坏他们带来的收益。用户会发现在服务之间切换更容易。新兴的竞争对手可以获得一些大公司所持有的数据，从而更好地发展到成熟而不被吞并。在未来的几十年里，股东们再也不能承担垄断利润了。

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Taming the titans"