科技改变生活大数据的利与弊_时事_双语阅读-查字典英语网

科技改变生活大数据的利与弊

贝宝(PayPal)联合创始人彼得•蒂尔(Peter Thiel)将谷歌描述为一家善良的垄断企业。如果它遇到真正的挑战，它的研发预算，连同它的无人驾驶汽车、可穿戴计算机，以及从平流层发射无线数据的“Loon热气球等科技创新都会化为泡影。我们应该认识到其市场主导地位的有利一面。正是有了垄断收益，谷歌才能资助不亚于美国电报电话公司(AT&T)传奇的贝尔实验室(Bell Labs)或施乐帕克研究中心(Xerox Park)的实验室，这些实验室做出的突破创新数不胜数。而且，数字行业的进入门槛很低，破坏者本身也可能遭到破坏。

But there are other sides to this story. The first is that Google’s chief complainants are UScompanies. This is not a transatlantic spat. It just so happens that Brussels has a toughercompetition regime.

但此事还有其他方面。首先，投诉谷歌的主要是美国企业。这不是一场跨大西洋的口水仗，欧盟委员会之所以会展开调查，只是刚好这里的竞争制度比较严格而已。

Yelp, Microsoft, Expedia and others have complained both to Brussels and Washington’sFederal Trade Commission about Google’s alleged anti-competitive practices. Indeed, in a 2012report, the FTC’s own staff recommended action on three counts against Google for conductthat had resulted in “real harm to consumers and to innovation. Google had been presentingcontent “scraped from other sites as its own. It had also been privileging its own commercialsites in search results — a clear conflict of interest. However, the FTC’s commissioners rejectedtheir staff’s conclusions. It might have been different had the probe been carried out by theDepartment of Justice, as was the case with Microsoft, which was penalised on both sides of theAtlantic more than a decade ago.