为什么要对科技巨头严加监管？
本月，美国科技界爆出了两起令人瞠目的丑闻。第一起是消费者信用报告机构Equifax遭到了一次大规模的网络攻击，而该公司处理不当，致使1.43亿美国人的个人数据面临风险。
The second is the admission by Facebook that it has uncovered at least $100,000-worth of advertisements placed on its platform by Russian-backed groups meddling in American elections. It comes after news of widespread manipulation by malevolent actors in the social media space.
第二起是Facebook承认，发现了俄罗斯背景的组织在其平台上投放了至少价值10万美元的广告，目的是插手美国大选。此前就有消息称，社交媒体领域存在恶意行为者的大量操纵。
These scandals may force American politicians in Congress and state legislatures to focus, finally, on what is happening in the weeds of the internet.
这些丑闻或许会迫使美国国会和各州立法机构的政客们终于开始关注互联网杂草丛中的糟糕现实。
Such scrutiny is desperately overdue. In recent years America’s tech titans, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have exploded in size, profitability and power. What is almost as startling as this ascent is how little debate it prompts inside Congress.
他们早就该管一管了。近年来，Facebook、谷歌(Google)、亚马逊(Amazon)等美国科技巨头在规模、盈利能力和影响力方面都出现了爆炸式增长。与这种地位蹿升几乎同样令人吃惊的是，其在国会内部引发的辩论少之又少。
True, some leftwing American politicians (such as Bernie Sanders) bemoan the low levels of tax paid by tech groups; rightwing voices complain that social media platforms have been slow to remove extremist Islamist material. But Congress has not held big inquiries into the quasi-monopoly powers that companies such as Facebook and Google hold within their own technology niches, or discussed how tech companies harvest consumer data, curate content or even manage cyber security.
没错，一些美国左翼政客——如伯尼•桑德斯(Bernie Sanders)——埋怨科技集团交税太少;右翼人士则抱怨称，社交媒体平台在清除极端伊斯兰主义内容方面行动迟缓。但国会并未就Facebook、谷歌这类公司在自身技术领域拥有的准垄断力量展开大规模调查，也没有围绕科技公司如何大量获取消费者数据、安排内容或者管理网络安全进行讨论。
The Equifax scandal revealed that the US lacks any overarching federal framework to set standards for disclosure of cyber hacks, and until now that state of affairs was barely discussed by politicians. Why? Lobbying is part of the tale. A decade ago, the dominant lobbyists in Washington were the banks and other financial groups. But today tech is eclipsing the banks, with companies such as Google near the top of the list of the largest corporate donors. The biggest five tech companies spent around $49m on lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, twice what the biggest five banks spent. Tech groups have also hired an army of former government officials, and poured money into academic foundations.
Equifax丑闻暴露出美国缺乏一个全面的联邦框架，为披露网络攻击行为设定标准，而政客们至今几乎没有讨论过这方面的事态。为什么呢?游说是原因之一。10年前，华盛顿的主要游说者是银行等金融集团。但如今，科技行业正在超越银行，谷歌等公司在大型企业捐赠者名单中升至前列。根据响应政治中心(Center for Responsive Politics)的数据，美国最大五家科技公司去年在游说上支出约4900万美元，是最大五家银行支出的两倍。科技集团还聘请了一大批前政府官员，并向各种学术基金会投入大量资金。
That has helped the tech world to deftly play all sides of the political spectrum. Democrats admire Silicon Valley for its progressive stance on issues such as gay rights and immigration reform. Many Republicans like the tech sector’s libertarian ideals and business savvy. Meanwhile, almost all politicians tend to view the innovative success of Silicon Valley as a point of national pride. Thus when European regulators criticise Facebook, Amazon or Google, it is often cast as a competitive attack.
这有助于科技界巧妙地在政治光谱中左右逢源。民主党人赞赏硅谷在同性恋权利、移民改革等问题上的进步立场。许多共和党人喜欢科技行业的自由意志主义理想和商业头脑。与此同时，几乎所有政客都倾向于把硅谷的创新成功看作民族自豪感的一个来源。因此，欧洲监管机构对Facebook、亚马逊或谷歌的批评，往往被描述为竞争者发起的攻击。
There is another way to make sense of this political silence: take an anthropological look at some of the cultural labels attached to tech. If you do that, it is possible to see some powerful parallels with the state of finance a decade ago.
还有一种理解这种政治沉默的方式：从人类学角度看待贴在科技行业上的一些文化标签。如果你这样做的话，有可能看到与10年前金融行业的一些惊人相似之处。
In the early years of this century it was clear that finance in general — and complex products like credit derivatives in particular — were exploding in scale. But politicians in American and Europe were uninterested in peering into the financial undergrowth. This partly reflected deft lobbying by banks, and deliberate opacity. But the simpler problem was that credit derivatives were swathed in technical language and acronyms and perceived by non-bankers to be utterly boring and dull.
本世纪头几年，很明显的是，金融领域总体呈现爆炸式增长，尤其是信贷衍生品等复杂产品。但美欧政客对研究金融业涌动的暗潮没有兴趣。这部分反映了银行的巧妙游说以及刻意的不透明。但更简单的问题是，信用衍生品被包裹在技术性语言和缩略词中;不是银行家的人认为实在太过枯燥乏味。
As a result, it felt natural for politicians, journalists and voters to avert their eyes and leave this sector to the geeks. After all, consumers were enjoying a bonanza of cheap mortgages; nobody felt much need to challenge the status quo. It was an area of “social silence”, to use the concept developed by Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist and intellectual; everything was hidden in plain sight.
其结果是，政客、记者、选民自然而然地把目光投向其他地方，把这个行业留给了“极客”。毕竟，消费者享受着廉价抵押贷款的盛宴;没人觉得有什么必要挑战现状。借用法国社会学家、知识分子皮埃尔•布尔迪厄(Pierre Bourdieu)提出的概念，这造就了一个“社会沉默”领域;一切都在眼前，却被人视若不见。
Of course, the titans of Silicon Valley insist they are saving the world, not sparking a systemic crisis. But the key point is that consumers are hooked on cheap (or quasi “free”) tech services, as they were hooked on cheap mortgages a decade ago. But few have any idea about how the internet works, or even care to ask. Once again, we have placed blind trust in geeks.
当然，硅谷的巨头们坚称，他们正在拯救世界，而非要引发一场系统性危机。但关键的是，消费者痴迷于廉价(或者貌似“免费”)的技术服务，就像他们在10年前被廉价抵押贷款吸引住一样。但很少有人了解互联网如何运作，甚至没人操心去问。我们再一次盲目地相信了“极客”。
Let us all hope that Congress now does its job with Facebook and Equifax and organises full-blown hearings and commissions about what went wrong. Let us also hope the politicians scramble, belatedly, to improve their technical knowledge about the internet. But consumers also need to do what they failed to do a decade ago: ask hard questions about what is being hidden in plain sight by the aura of complexity. And then force politicians to act.
让我们希望美国国会现在能针对Facebook和Equifax履行自己的职能，围绕问题出在哪里举行全面的听证会，并成立相关调查委员会。让我们也希望政客们努力提高自身的互联网技术知识——虽然迟了一些。而消费者也需要做10年前未能做到之事：围绕复杂性光环之下隐藏的种种弊病提出尖锐的问题，然后迫使政客们采取行动。
