2018年考研英语二阅读 Text 3 原文翻译及答案解析

The power and ambition of the giants of the digital economy is astonishing — Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $ 13.5bn, but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn't have any physical product at all. What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed web of its users' friendships and social lives.

数字经济巨头的力量和雄心令人震惊——亚马逊刚刚宣布以135亿美元收购高端食品杂货连锁店Whole Foods，但两年前Facebook支付了更高的价格收购了WhatsApp消息服务，该服务根本没有实体产品。WhatsApp为Facebook提供的是一张复杂而精细的用户友谊和社交生活网络。

Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be. What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May's enemies are currently plotting? It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the 460 shops it owns, but the records of which customers have purchased what.

Facebook当时向欧盟委员会承诺不会将电话号码与Facebook身份关联，但交易一完成，它就几乎立刻违背了承诺。即使不知道消息内容，知道谁发送了消息以及发送给谁也极具揭示性，现在依然如此。哪位政治记者、哪位党鞭不想知道特蕾莎·梅的敌人目前策划的WhatsApp群的构成？或许Whole Foods对亚马逊的价值并不在于它拥有的460家店铺，而在于记录了哪些客户购买了什么。

Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. Competition law as presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don't pay for them. The users of their services are not their customers. That would be the people who buy advertising from them - and Facebook and Google, the two virtual giants, dominate digital advertising to the disadvantage of all other media and entertainment companies.

竞争法似乎是解决这些权力失衡的唯一途径。但它很笨拙。首先，与数字经济内部的变化速度相比，它非常缓慢。等到问题被解决和补救时，它可能已经在市场上消失，被新的权力滥用所取代。但还有一个更深层次的概念问题。目前解释的竞争法处理的是对消费者的财务劣势，而当这些服务的用户不付费时，这一点并不明显。他们的服务用户不是客户。真正的客户是从他们那里购买广告的人——而Facebook和Google这两大虚拟巨头主导了数字广告，对所有其他媒体和娱乐公司不利。

The product they're selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids for the honeydew they produce when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives yield. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn't feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.

他们销售的产品是数据，而我们用户将生活转化为数据，以造福数字巨头。就像一些蚂蚁养殖名为蚜虫的虫子以获取它们进食时产生的蜜露一样，Google养殖我们以获取我们数字生活产生的数据。蚂蚁将捕食性昆虫从蚜虫进食的地方赶走；Gmail将垃圾邮件发送者挡在我们的收件箱之外。这感觉不像是人类或民主的关系，即使双方都受益。