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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.
Much of this techlash is misguided. 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 “platforms” for much of the digital economy.
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. 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.
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. 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 scrutinize mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to neutralize a potential long-term threat, even if the target is small at the time. Second, trustbusters need to think afresh about how tech markets work. A central insight 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. Therefore, it needs a new set of laws to govern the ownership and exchange of data, with the aim of giving solid rights to individuals.
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. Regulators could oblige platform firms to make anonymised bulk data available to competitors, in return for a fee. These mechanisms would turn data from something titans hoard, to suppress competition, into something users share, to foster innovation.
1. The word “plaudits” (Line 2, Para. 1) is closest in meaning to ______.
[A] criticism
[B] acclaim
[C] remarks
[D] doubts
2. A sound reason for people's worry about the fair play is that tech giants ______.
[A] have dominated the competition for digital economy
[B] always make profits from illegal practices
[C] often misguide their consumers and competitors
[D] are not involved in the market competition
3. Consumers will fall victim of a tech industry when ______.
[A] titans are deprived of good ideas and capital
[B] giants continue to have the largest share of data
[C] startups are given more attention and support
[D] giants can be challenged by allied startups
4. Tech markets work on an underlying assumption that ______.
[A] individuals' rights should be defended
[B] personal data are provided by tech titans as products
[C] the existing competition law should aim at any long-term threat
[D] customers' information is exchanged for services
5. It can be inferred from the last paragraph that ______.
[A] data can be used to encourage competition
[B] users are obliged to promote innovation
[C] data should be shared free of charge
[D] the role of regulators is of top priority