2024年4月17日发(作者：番茄花园维生素c)

The world’s most valuable resource

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting

antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century

ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by

the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet

(Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look

unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their

profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first

quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America.

Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital

advertising in America last year.

Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as

Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. This newspaper has argued against

such drastic action in the past. Size alone is not a crime. The giants’ success has

benefited consumers. Few want to live without Google’s search engine,

Amazon’s one-day delivery or Facebook’s newsfeed. Nor do these firms raise

the alarm when standard antitrust tests are applied. Far from gouging consumers,

many of their services are free (users pay, in effect, by handing over yet more

data). Take account of offline rivals, and their market shares look less worrying.

And the emergence of upstarts like Snapchat suggests that new entrants can still

make waves.

But there is cause for concern. Internet companies’ control of data gives

them enormous power. Old ways of thinking about competition, devised in the

era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the “data economy”

(see

Briefing

). A new approach is needed.

Quantity has a quality all its own

What has changed? Smartphones and the internet have made data

abundant, ubiquitous and far more valuable. Whether you are going for a run,

watching TV or even just sitting in traffic, virtually every activity creates a digital

trace—more raw material for the data distilleries. As devices from watches to cars

connect to the internet, the volume is increasing: some estimate that a self-

driving car will generate 100 gigabytes per second. Meanwhile, artificial-

intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning extract more value from

data. Algorithms can predict when a customer is ready to buy, a jet-engine needs

servicing or a person is at risk of a disease. Industrial giants such as GE and

Siemens now sell themselves as data firms.

This abundance of data changes the nature of competition. Technology

giants have always benefited from network effects: the more users Facebook

signs up, the more attractive signing up becomes for others. With data there are

extra network effects. By collecting more data, a firm has more scope to improve

its products, which attracts more users, generating even more data, and so on.

The more data Tesla gathers from its self-driving cars, the better it can make them

at driving themselves—part of the reason the firm, which sold only 25,000 cars in

the first quarter, is now worth more than GM, which sold 2.3m. Vast pools of data

can thus act as protective moats.

Access to data also protects companies from rivals in another way. The case

for being sanguine about competition in the tech industry rests on the potential

for incumbents to be blindsided by a startup in a garage or an unexpected

technological shift. But both are less likely in the data age. The giants’

surveillance systems span the entire economy: Google can see what people

search for, Facebook what they share, Amazon what they buy. They own app

stores and operating systems, and rent out computing power to startups. They

have a “God’s eye view” of activities in their own markets and beyond. They

can see when a new product or service gains traction, allowing them to copy it or

simply buy the upstart before it becomes too great a threat. Many think

Facebook’s $22bn purchase in 2014 of WhatsApp, a messaging app with fewer

than 60 employees, falls into this category of “shoot-out acquisitions” that

eliminate potential rivals. By providing barriers to entry and early-warning

systems, data can stifle competition.

Who ya gonna call, trustbusters?

The nature of data makes the antitrust remedies of the past less useful.

Breaking up a firm like Google into five Googlets would not stop network effects

from reasserting themselves: in time, one of them would become dominant

again. A radical rethink is required—and as the outlines of a new approach start

to become apparent, two ideas stand out.