谁害怕谷歌？

Who's afraid of Google?

Aug 30th 2007

From The Economist print edition

The world's internet superpower faces testing times

互连网世界的超级动力面临检验时刻

RARELY if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world's most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues; the number of people clicking in search of news, the nearest pizza parlour or a satellite image of their neighbour's garden; the volume of its advertisers; or the number of its lawyers and lobbyists.

极少有公司能象世界上最受欢迎的搜索引擎公司谷歌一样，在如此短的时间内以如此繁杂的方法迅速崛起。不管从那个角度来讲，这个事实都确定无疑：它的市场价值和年收入的增长量；它的用户数量，这些用户利用google敲击键盘搜索新闻、寻找最近的皮萨店以及观看邻居花园的卫星照片；它的广告商名目表；还有它所拥有的律师和说客的数量。

Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns—both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.

这些上升的趋势足够激发某些既偏执性又合理的关注。憎恨或者畏惧谷歌的选民名单每周都在增长。有线电视、图书出版商以及新闻报刊发行人觉得谷歌使用他们的内容实现了增长，却没有向他们付费。在电信行业，诸如美国电话电报公司和Verizon等 通信公司，则多少有点恼火。在他们看来，谷歌的繁荣是因为免费搭乘了他们所提供的带宽服务顺风车；而且看起来谷歌还会在即将来临的无线频段竞拍中抬高竞价 和它竞争。除此之外，还有许多小公司痛恨谷歌，因为这些公司依赖于使用谷歌的搜索规则，使它们能在等级评定系统中赢得最好的位置。但是在谷歌调整了那些搜 索规则的算法之后，他们的评定级别一下子掉落到了地狱的深渊。

And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google's deal with China's censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google's business model (see article) assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company's “cloud” of remote computers. These data begin with the logs of a user's searches (in effect, a record of his interests) and his responses to advertisements. Often they extend to the user's e-mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos. They could soon include even the user's medical records and precise location (determined from his mobile phone).

政治人物现在也来凑热闹。自由主义者反对谷歌和中国的审查部门达成的交易。保守党对那些未经审查的视频图象牢骚满腹。但是新近最大的忧虑是如何处理用户的隐私问题。谷歌的商业模式(本期有专题报道)是预先假定人们授权它获取有关他们日常生活的额外信息，并允许保存在公司的“乌云”远程计算机上。这些数据记录了从每个用户的搜索关键字(实际上就是他的个人兴趣记录)到他对广告的回应情况等相关细节。通常情况下，他们还会把这些做法延伸到用户的e-mail、日程表、联系人列表、文档、电子数据表、照片以及视频文件中。不久之后他们甚至还会把用户的体检记录和精确位置包括进去(利用用户的移动电话定位)。

More JP Morgan than Bill Gates

Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people's money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.谷歌公司常被拿来和微软对比(顺便说下，两者是竞争对手)；但是它的发展演变更类似于银行业。恰如金融机构逐渐成长为民众的储藏室，并因而成为他们私人经济状况信息的保管人一样，谷歌公司正在成为更广泛、更私密范围内个人信息的保管人。当然，这种情况在它的竞争对手，诸如Yahoo！和微软那里也存在。但是谷歌公司依靠它积累的信息技术财富的飞速飙升，将是唯一一个去检验社会容忍度极限的公司。

It does not help that Google is often seen as arrogant. Granted, this complaint often comes from sour-grapes rivals. But many others are put off by Google's cocksure assertion of its own holiness, as if it merited unquestioning trust. This after all is the firm that chose “Don't be evil” as its corporate motto and that explicitly intones that its goal is “not to make money”, as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but “to change the world”. Its ownership structure is set up to protect that vision.常被外界解读为傲慢自大的谷歌的形象对此有害无益。必须承认，那些哎声怨气通常来自于有酸葡萄心理的竞争对手。更多的其他人则被谷歌对自己的深信无疑的纯洁的表白搪塞过去，似乎它毫无疑问地值得信任。这毕竟是选择了“不做恶” 作为其经营理念的公司，它直言不讳地讴歌它的目的“不为赚钱”。为的是，象它的老板埃里克·施密特所陈述的那样 “去改变世界”。它的股权结构就是特意制定来保持这个表象的。

Ironically, there is something rather cloudlike about the multiple complaints surrounding Google. The issues are best parted into two cumuli: a set of “public” arguments about how to regulate Google; and a set of “private” ones for Google's managers, to do with the strategy the firm needs to get through the coming storm. On both counts, Google—contrary to its own propaganda—is much better judged as being just like any other “evil” money-grabbing company.

具 有讽刺意味的是，围绕谷歌的多起诉讼的确有点象乌云。争论的焦点可以非常恰当地分成两块堆积云：一块是讨论如何调整谷歌公司的“公众”讨论；另一块是为谷 歌的管理者出谋划策的“私营”业主，他们认为谷歌需要采取策略躲过即将来临的暴风雨。但是从双方来讲，对谷歌的评价要显然好于那些其他“邪恶的”的只知道 大把捞钱的公司，虽然这和谷歌自己的宣传相左。

Grab the money攫取钱财

That is because, from the public point of view, the main contribution of all companies to society comes from making profits, not giving things away. Google is a good example of this. Its “goodness” stems less from all that guff about corporate altruism than from Adam Smith's invisible hand. It provides a service that others find very useful—namely helping people to find information (at no charge) and letting advertisers promote their wares to those people in a finely targeted way.

从公众的观点来看，这是因为，所有企业对社会的重要贡献都来源于获得收益，而非把东西拱手送人。谷歌就是个很好的例子。它的“善行”更多的来源于亚当·斯密的看不见的手，而非许多人鼓吹的所谓企业利它主义。它提供让别人感觉非常有用的服务，既帮助人们寻找信息(不必付费)，以及让广告商用精心指定的方法推广他们的商品给特定人群。

Given this, the onus of proof is with Google's would-be prosecutors to prove it is doing something wrong. On antitrust, the price that Google charges its advertisers is set by auction, so its monopolistic clout is limited; and it has yet to use its dominance in one market to muscle into others in the way Microsoft did. The same presumption of innocence goes for copyright and privacy. Google's book-search product, for instance, arguably helps rather than hurts publishers and authors by rescuing books from obscurity and encouraging readers to buy copyrighted works. And, despite Big Brotherish talk about knowing what choices people will be making tomorrow, Google has not betrayed the trust of its users over their privacy. If anything, it has been better than its rivals in standing up to prying governments in both America and China.

就 以上情况来看，那些自命的谷歌案件的原告所负担的举证责任是证明谷歌确实正在作错事。按照反拖拉斯法案，谷歌向它的广告商收取的广告费用是基于竞价机制 的，所以垄断打击力度在此有限；它至今仍然在运用的手段，利用其支配性优势从一个市场强攻另一个市场，却正是微软公司一直使用的。就版权和隐私问题也可以 作出同样无罪的推定。例如谷歌的图书搜索服务，可以通过论证表明它对出版商和作者的帮助要远大于伤害，它可以把图书从湮没无闻的境地中挽救出来，激励读者 购买有著作权的著作。并且，尽管谷歌用老大哥式的口吻说教道没人知道人们明天会作出什么决定，但是他并没有撇开用户的隐私背叛他们的信任。如果非要说有什 么不当行为的话，那就是不论在美国和中国谷歌都敢于和政府对抗，而这一点它要比竞争对手做的好得多。

That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable—especially with privacy. Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google's profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful. If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur.这 说明，利益的冲突会越来越无可避免，特别是在个人隐私方面。在谷歌向你销售更多服务之前，它实际上控制了一个可以从两个方向移入的转盘。从一方面来讲，谷 歌可以非常迅速地自愿销毁它收集的任何用户数据。那能确保用户隐私，但是会使谷歌的收益受限，使它提供的服务用处变得少了。因为它本来可以向广告商出售关 于你在做什么的信息，从而获取收益。如果转盘从另一方向移入，谷歌把那些信息保留着，它提供的服务就会变的有用得多，但是一些令人厌恶的侵犯隐私现象就会 发生。

The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. But, as the bankers (and Bill Gates) can attest, public scrutiny also creates a private challenge for Google's managers: how should they present their case?

就象过去银行业所做的一样，答案是必须保持中立于某种态度；当大环境变化时，对转盘的正确观点是可能改变的。中立态度会是对谷歌的主流公共兴趣所在。但是，恰如银行家(以及比尔·盖茨)所能证明的一样，公共审查同样给谷歌的管理者创造了一个难题：他们应该如何呈现案例本身。

One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google's trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that, just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing. 显 而易见的策略是通过加大透明度以及公开更多的审查程序和计划，来缓和超越谷歌的可依赖性以外被关注度。但是这同样需要更深切地痛下决心去做出改变。试着去 做出一种姿态，不能仅因为你们的创建人是善良的年轻人并提供了许多的服务，就认为社会没有权利去质疑你们的动机。那样地话就太不理智了。谷歌是资本家的工 具——有效的工具。踏踏实实地去迎接基金所面对的即将来临的暴风雨，要比使用可能导致衰败的老套口号要漂亮得多。