Editor's note: This article is from Wall Street News , author Tao Yanjie. 36 Krypton is reproduced with permission.
They are "gatekeepers" with the ability to sift through information; their power can spill over to other markets, and they are way ahead at the starting line; they can also watch your every move, ready to take you away from other products Come back and let competing products die in the cradle.
The information leak of Facebook made the American people realize overnight that Internet giants like Amazon, Facebook or Google can already cover the sky with one hand.
The Stigler Center blog of the University of Chicago Business School recently published an article, mentioning three kinds of powers of American technology giants: the power of gatekeepers, the power of leveraged amplification, and the power of information mining.
"Gatekeeper"
Gatekeeper or gatekeeper is a communication concept, which means that gatekeepers can screen information, including news media screening and editing news for audiences, or companies deciding whether products can enter the market.
The article, titled "What Makes Tech Platforms So Powerful? ” article mentioned that the gatekeeper power of Internet giants comes from their mastery of the infrastructure that other companies must rely on to develop online businesses.
55% of shopping searches in the U.S. are conducted on Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook dominate 73% of U.S. online advertising, and 83% of growth, while Apple and Alphabet monopolize 99% of the world’s smartphone operating systems.
This mastery of infrastructure makes these tech giants the only option for everyone.
Once you have power, you can't stop abusing it. Gatekeepers have the ability to filter information, and technology giants with the essence of enterprises naturally hope to harvest more wool from users who cannot do without them. And they will continue to use the power of gatekeepers to limit third-party access to their users and further consolidate their position.
leveraged power
Not only is there leverage in the financial market, but tech giants have the ability to leverage.
As mentioned earlier, gatekeepers give giants the ability to sift through information, and through leveraged amplification, tech giants amplify their power from online infrastructure to all markets.
For example, if Amazon's own products compete with other products sold on Amazon, then Amazon can give priority to its own products and let the competing products rank lower on its own platform. ——This is of course outrageous. Last year, the European Commission fined Google $2.7 billion for abusing its dominance of its own search engine and directing users to Google’s shopping service.
information mining
This power is relatively easy to understand. The monopoly position and user base of Internet giants provide them with massive data. How long have you been on the page today, where the cursor is pointing, or how long the item in the shopping cart has been in the shopping cart, how many times have you looked at it - as long as you want, the giants can know.
Derived from this, as long as the Internet giants are willing, they can also collect the data of third-party websites and other apps - when Google remembers the password of a specific website for you, it may also collect your behavior on this website. data.
Data is money, Facebook's leak scandal, Zuckerberg had to go out, all because of this abuse of information mining power. Of course, Facebook did not necessarily take the initiative to do evil in this incident, but there is no doubt that negative management is ineffective.
In the face of a large amount of information and data, "killing familiarity" began to appear, and the differentiated pricing of taxi software has become the most widely spread example. What is even more exaggerated is that the giants can also closely monitor which possible competitors are stealing their users, and take action as soon as possible to take advantage of the information asymmetry between users and the platform to restore users and put emerging rivals behind. strangled in the cradle.
solution?
The above three kinds of power can largely explain the monopoly position of American Internet giants today. And this blog post published by the University of Chicago Business School also explores possible ways to restrict the giants.
The article mentions that gatekeepers and leveraged power have precedents in the past. As long as there is a monopoly, there are gatekeepers, and they can expand further.
For the "gatekeeper", the solution in the past was that the government came forward to set the rules, such as the "antitrust law" of the United States, which was born to fight against the monopoly of the railway company in the second half of the 19th century. The issue of leverage is also relatively easy to handle. If gatekeepers want to extend their power to other fields, they should limit their activities in other fields, prevent platforms from participating in competition, and cannot be referees and athletes.
But information mining is a new challenge in the era of big data. These platforms live on data, and they have not only privacy issues, but also malicious competition. Regulating the behavior of giants or one of the methods, such as limiting the areas in which they collect data, and restricting their use of data - specific measures are still up for discussion.
But in any case, the blog post pointed out that these big platforms should promote the free flow of information and be consistent with the open market and fair competition, rather than undermining this concept and using information black holes for their own benefit.