When the 34-year-old Zuckerberg, the youngest founder of the world's super tech giants, was forced to go to the U.S. Congress to be questioned by lawmakers over privacy issues, when he connected more than one billion Chinese and created the ubiquitous WeChat , When Tencent, which once held the title of the most valuable company in Asia, was questioned that it had no dreams, it seemed to imply the end of an era: the one who regarded Yang Jieyuan, Bezos, Page, Zuckerberg, Jack Ma, and Ma Huateng as idols and gave Times with special care.
Excluding Jerry Yang and his Yahoo, who had been exiled by users and up-and-comers like Google, almost all of the heavyweights have suffered in recent years from pressures that traditionally fall outside of business in one way or another:
Google, which used antitrust as one of the main contents of "don't do evil" and ridiculed Microsoft, has been caught up in antitrust investigations in recent years, and was fined 2.42 billion by the European Union last year for "misusing its dominant position and hindering competition". EUR;
In the United States, under pressure, Facebook and Twitter, two social media that have been entangled in freedom of speech in the past, finally decided to take active actions in the fields of counter-terrorism and fake news;
In China, doubts about the business models of Baidu and Ctrip appear from time to time, and both Alibaba and Tencent have also been questioned by the society because of some of their businesses or business characteristics, such as Tencent's King of Glory scandal and Alibaba's suffering from the traditional economy. And the pressure from users (in marketing events), even a young company like Toutiao - its app, Nei Duanzi, was permanently shut down not long ago due to issues such as vulgarity.
The bad thing is that these bad situations cannot be easily escaped, and may never be escaped again - unless the companies in them can wake up to what happened and find appropriate countermeasures, in the retrospective and outlook article " In Social Co-governance, Technology-Driven and AT Reality, Yin Sheng (WeChat Official Account: Yin Sheng's Values) calls it the trend of social co-governance. This trend comes from the following factors:
First, with the popularity of smartphones, the global Internet penetration rate has approached 50%, becoming a real social infrastructure. This can be seen from the user scale of Tencent and Facebook, the two major social networks - WeChat has nearly 1 billion monthly active users, and Facebook's monthly and daily active users have reached 2.2 billion and 1.45 billion, respectively. In this case, the every move of Internet companies and Internet users has a huge impact, which is amplified by the widespread network effects of the Internet.
Second, the business models of Internet companies are inherently socially sensitive. So far, the main business models of Internet companies are all based on the use of user data, whether they are social networks or search engines that mainly use advertising models, or traditional content. Portals, or companies that have built user-pay models, like Amazon or Netflix, are no exception. When user growth slows (as reflected by the decline in global and Chinese smartphone shipments last year), the driver of user growth that has been relied on in the past will inevitably turn to the competition for monetization efficiency, which will undoubtedly increase the use of user data. .
Third, the prosperity of the Internet economy has led to a trend of head solidification not only within the technology industry, but even at the entire economic level. These solidifications may be reflected in multiple levels such as capital, technology, and commerce. This is shown in the fact that since the emergence of Facebook and Netflix's full-scale transformation of streaming media and finally establishing the main head pattern of the world's Internet today, there has never been a force enough to shake this head pattern, even if it doubled the size of the Internet. Mobile Internet is no exception.
Among the heavyweight players (including apps) that emerged after this, with a few exceptions such as Uber, Square, Snapchat, Toutiao, etc., most of them were either born inside the super-heads, such as WeChat and WeChat Pay, or became their prey , such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Youtube, etc., either run through the power of giants or have become an important part of their ecology, such as Didi, Meituan, etc.
Not surprisingly, the world's first trillion-dollar company will soon appear in the Internet-related fields. What makes the public dissatisfied is that even so, these giants still enjoy more or less the supra-national treatment they have enjoyed from the beginning, such as taxation, intellectual property protection, development and user (now they have expanded to most In terms of policies related to the public), regulation as infrastructure, etc., they still have almost or rarely the same requirements as traditional industry companies.
Fourth, the impact of the Internet on traditional social and economic structures. As the most advanced source of productivity today, the influence of the Internet is as deep and broad as any industrial revolution, or even worse, which means that it is not only an independent industry that has created huge wealth, but also recreates social and economic structures. ——Whether those giants at the head are intentional or not, willing or unwilling-for example, the depth of the Internet’s involvement in American elections is considered to threaten the American electoral system, and the disintegration and reconstruction of traditional industries even lead to the special President Trump's open fire on Amazon, and the giants' long-term inaction on issues such as counter-terrorism and fake news has further complicated the problem.
All these conflicts will ultimately be concentrated on what kind of Internet world and society we need, or further, what kind of Internet social governance system we need. The Internet unleashes productivity and shatters traditions, but you can't expect them to play a just role in the construction of new social governance systems—and they can't actually do that, because they just carry Private-purpose business organizations that are destined to fight for the benefit of the few.
In sync with this question, how should we view the role of the Internet economy—after all, the economy is one of the main settings of society, and now the Internet economy is controlled by a few giants—from the perspective of social governance, the purpose of economic allocation of resources, In the end, it is to increase the total value of society. So far, in the Internet-based economy, Internet giants are mainly formulating these value standards. Obviously, this is not reasonable.
The fifth is the by-product of the Internet - the awakening of the bottom layer and the improvement of the ability to participate in society, which will eventually reflect on the Internet giants themselves and put more demands on it.
For these companies, they have entered a new territory - one that transcends mere user, product, market, technology and business competition - and when the Internet as technology becomes a social reconstructor, Internet companies must avoid Big and over-inflated and out of bounds: The making of social rules must be done by the process of socialization, not the private affairs of the Internet companies themselves (done in a closed, opaque, arbitrary mode).
In other words, you have to start taking seriously the question of whether the Internet is the Internet of society or the Internet of Internet companies, and how to help society improve its social governance, even if it imposes significant restrictions on itself. In fact, this restriction is beneficial to the long-term development of giants, because whether it is big data or artificial intelligence, their future depends on the trust of society, otherwise they may face uncontrollable regulation or even be dismembered. As I wrote a while ago:
The mediaization of the content industry is the main background triggering this round of purges. The traditional content industry follows a relatively controllable form and production and distribution process (in fact, it is productized). Even if new carriers such as Weibo and WeChat portals appear later, which increases the openness of content, they are basically locked into existing ones. Within the framework of the regulatory system, relevant companies have also developed corresponding self-regulatory capabilities and established a certain degree of trust in regulators, while Douyin connotation Kuaishou, etc., in a field where supervision is much more difficult than graphics and text, by empowering users Participate in this, leaving the traditional supervision system in a de facto state of failure. Some time ago, I don’t even know where the voice that Douyin wants to replace Weibo came from. If it wasn’t for the opponent’s intentional killing, it was because the company lacked an ecological outlook. . In the end, only those content providers who develop credible self-regulation capabilities and help the regulatory system build such trust can pick up new fruits like small videos.
For how to deal with this trend, before Yin Sheng's "Social Co-governance, Technology Driven and AT Reality", "What Kind of Tencent and China Internet Do We Want?" " and "After BAT, not JAT, but SAT" has been analyzed in the three articles:
One of the fundamental forces driving the management of Internet giants from private autonomy to social co-governance is that when these companies develop from an independent business entity to economic and social infrastructure, the evolution from industrial competition to ecological competition is in their best interests. Because their interests are more and more closely related to the overall interests of the entire ecology (including society and economy, etc.), which requires them to start from the overall interests of the ecology, not just selfish interests, and take a more open management approach. Attitude, taking into account multiple voices.
Another force for change comes from the demands of society. In the evaluation of the value of the whole society, not only the weight of individual companies is very small, but even the economy as a whole is only one of many indicators. Although different societies have different preferences, taking into account the values of efficiency, fairness and diversity, long-term and short-term interests, are the common default principles of human beings. In order to effectively manage different indicators, human beings turn to governments and social organizations.
This means that Ali, as an economic infrastructure, needs to consider more indicators than its own operations, such as overall employment, maintenance of various lifestyles such as online and offline, fairness in wealth distribution, efficiency of overall economic operation, innovation As a technology, social and potential economic infrastructure, Tencent, in addition to what Ali needs to consider, also needs to consider similar issues, such as user time and economic management, virtual society management, overall well-being, personal career development and socialization, the social consequences of technology, etc.
If they fail to take the initiative to take these indicators into consideration, they will end up either facing a decline or even loss of competitive position, or the intervention of governments or social organizations—they take on the responsibility of regulators of broader value indicators, giving them enough reason Intervene in these new management environments, after all, the Internet and even the economy are only part of the broader social value system.
When this becomes a reality, the free soil that has supported the Internet boom in the past will no longer exist, and laws and regulations will eventually catch up. Think about those traditional models of managing economic and social infrastructure, and you'll understand that this means What, leading companies in fields like telecommunications, energy, public services, etc., they even have the power to set their own prices will be placed under the management of the government, and this is only one of the broad scope of regulation they accept.
In the future, the involvement of the government and society will become more and more normal, because it is difficult for an enterprise as an independent interest body to jump out of its own interests, and the social co-governance model has become a reality that Internet giants have to accept. Or the opportunity to create certainty (if sensible enough). (More Clicks: Independent Innovation ) (Link: http://www.chuangxin360.com )