科技大公司正在颠覆资本主义的基本规则

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.”

过去几周，要求政界人士和监管者遏制科技巨头垄断力量的压力不断加大。在9月12日的一场演讲中，美国联邦贸易委员会(Federal Trade Commission)代理主席莫琳•奥尔豪森(Maureen Ohlhausen)试图给这一构想泼冷水。“考虑到技术驱动的创新为消费者带来的明显好处，”她说。“我对这方面的压力感到担忧，它将无视消费者的利益，而去追求其他、甚至可能相互冲突的目标。”

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.

她的话呼应了过去40年来美国的反垄断政策：如果企业为消费者降低了价格，它们在经济和政治层面无论多么庞大和强大都没问题。这对谷歌(Google)、Facebook及亚马逊(Amazon)这样的公司非常有利，这些公司提供从搜索结果到个人出版平台的服务和产品，不仅便宜，而且免费。

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，奥尔豪森忽视了关键的一点：免费并不真的意味着免费——当你考虑到尽管我们没有用美元为这些服务付费，却在用数据付费，包括各种数据，从我们的信用卡号到购物记录，从政治选择到病历。这些个人数据的价值有多高?

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.

从经济学家到艺术家，各方都对这个问题越来越感兴趣。例如，在2014年成立的汉堡装置艺术杂货店Datenmarkt，一罐水果的“售价”是5张Facebook照片;一袋吐司值8个“赞”，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.

关键的问题在于，精确定价个人数据几乎是不可能的，部分原因是，对于自己有多大可能会交出这些信息，人们表现出千差万别的行为和想法，取决于对方给出的交换条件。在最近的一项研究中，当消费者被直截了当地问到，是否同意接受一家知名数字媒体公司的追踪，以换取更为“有用的”广告时，五分之四的人都表示拒绝。然而，麻省理工学院(MIT)和斯坦福大学(Stanford University)的研究人员今年发表的另一项研究显示，只需要微不足道的一点激励，就能说服人们交出整个邮件联络人名单。如果提供一个免费比萨，接受研究的很多学生就很有可能这么做。

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.

有人也许辩称，这只是市场在发挥其应有的作用。消费者得到了一个选择，他们也做出了选择。至于这个选择是否明智，根本不是我们要评判的事情。

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.

但后一项研究还表明，企业能够鼓动用户更自在地交出数据——只要告诉他们，他们的数据会受到技术保护，而这些技术的设计初衷就是“防止包括从政府到互联网服务提供商在内的所有人……窥探通讯内容。”事实上，他们所用的加密技术并不能保证这一点。

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.

关键是大数据使整个竞争格局明显对那些最大的数字企业自己有利。他们可以提取信息并在其中植入建议，引导我们做出截然不同的决定，最终给这些公司带来越来越多的利润。

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.

这不仅让一家公司拥有太多力量，而且是反竞争和扭曲市场的，从这个意义上讲，我们所知的资本主义的基本规则正在被颠覆。在这种情形下，各方没有平等获取市场信息的机会。肯定不存在价格透明性。

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.

我们如此随意交出的个人数据正在被全球最富有的公司(例如Facebook，今年第二季度的营业利润率达47.2%)大规模地货币化。它们差不多免费获取原材料(我们的数据)，然后据此向零售商和广告商收取费用，后两者再将这些成本以某种形式转嫁到我们身上——比如，你在搜索到的小酒馆喝一杯酒时多付出的一美元。他们有“印钞许可证”，就各种各样的公司责任而言，不必承受其他行业不得不应对的诸多制约。

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.

借用哥伦比亚大学(Columbia University)法学院吴修铭(Tim Wu)教授的说法，与其说这些企业是创新者，不如说他们是“注意力商人”(attention merchants)。经济学家还未就这些企业对生产率和国内生产总值(GDP)增长的净效应估测出乐观数字。这些数字肯定会很高。然而，任何这样的计算都必须纳入竞争成本，因为这些公司会吞没竞争对手，以适合自己的方式重塑21世纪经济。

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.

无论联邦贸易委员会现在说什么，都有越来越多的司法案件可能改变针对大型科技公司的基本规则。虽然美国的反垄断法律是基于对1890年《休曼法》(Sherman Act)的严格字面解释，但欧洲立法者走得更远。他们正试图评估当下经济生态系统中的多个主体正如何受到这些数字巨擘的影响。

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.

我开始纳闷，我们是不是都该拥有更明确的权利——不仅控制我们的数据如何被使用，还要对这些数据创造的任何经济价值享有权益。在财富主要依托知识产权的时代，很难想象还能有什么别的数学计算逻辑。我们生活在一个狂野新世界，使用一种全新的“货币”。这个世界将需要创造性思维——经济上、法律上和政治上——以确保其不会变成一个赢家通吃的社会。

rana.foroohar@ft.com

译者/何黎