Aug 31, 2007, 23:36
| Who's afraid of Google?
谁对谷歌担忧？ Aug 30th 2007 From The Economist print edition The world's internet superpower faces testing times 世界互联网”超级大国“正面临考验时刻 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. 极少有过一家公司（如果曾有过的话）能和世界最流行的搜索引擎谷歌一样在如此多的方面取得如此迅速地成长。用任何一个衡量尺度来说都是如此：市价增长、收入增长； 查找新闻、距离最近的一家比萨店，或邻居家花园的卫星图片的点击人数、广告商数、或谷歌的律师和谷歌的游说者人数。 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. 这个上升的过程足够引起人们担忧--有因为多虑的担忧也有正当的担忧。 憎恨或者害怕谷歌成长的人们的名单是按每周来递增。电视网络，图书发行商，还有报业业主的感觉谷歌的成长是通过未经过付费用它们提供的内容。 AT&T,Verizon这些电信公司对谷歌感到愤怒。在它们看来，谷歌的成长是通过“骑在”由它们所提供的宽带上，而且它还要在将到来的频谱竞拍上与它们一起竞拍；许多小公司对谷歌感到憎恨，因为它们原来依靠挖掘谷歌的搜索方程式获得了自己公司排名靠前位置，但是在谷歌对这些算法稍作修改之后，这些公司排名一落千丈，好比掉入了一个互联网上的“地狱“中。 More JP Morgan than Bill Gates 和“盖茨”比起来更象“摩根” 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. 谷歌往往被比作是微软（那是它的另一个敌人，顺提一下）；但是实际上它的演变更像一家银行业的公司。 正好和金融机构发展成人们金钱的贮藏处，并从而成为人们金融方面的私人信息的守护人一样，谷歌现在正在变成一个范围广阔的多，要密切的多的个人信息的守护人。 是的，例如雅虎，微软在这一点上也相同。 但是凭借谷歌进行积累信息“财富”的速度，它将会成为社会容忍限度的测试员。 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. 这并改变谷歌被通常看成傲慢形象的局面。诚然，抱怨声往往来自四家“说葡萄酸”的对手那。但是还有别的许多人而放弃谷歌，因为谷歌笃信地对自身圣洁进行维护，似乎它就应该获得不容置疑的信任，。 毕竟，这是一家将“不为恶”做为口号的公司，一家明确地吟诵它的目标，按老板Eric Schmidt所讲的“不去赚钱”，而是“去改变世界”的公司。 公司所有权结构就是以保护这个远景来建立的。 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. 具有讽刺意味地是，围绕谷歌的多个抱怨非常象“云状”。 最好就是去将那些问题分成两堆。:一类关于如何对谷歌如何监管的“公众“争论；和一类针对谷歌管理者来说的”私下”争论，关于如何在经历这场即将到来的风暴公司所需采取的策略。在这两类上，把谷歌评为(和它自己宣传正相反的）一家与任何其它“罪恶”攫取钱财公司如出一辙，这要更为确切得多。 [ Last edited by languagetips at 2007-9-1 11:18 AM ] |
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hly_abc
| Grab the money
攫取金钱 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. 这是因为从民众的角度来看，所有公司赋予社会的主要捐献都是自获取利润，而并非散发物品。谷歌就是一个说明的好例子。它的"好”与其说是源于关于企业利他主义的一些胡扯，倒不如说是源于亚当.斯密那“看不见的手”。谷歌提供的是一项让别人感到非常有用的服务--即：（免费）帮助人们找信息，并且让广告商把自己的货品按一种非常有的放矢的方式来推销给人们。 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. 如果是这样的话，那么那些希望控告谷歌的人们就承担了证明谷歌在某些事情上做错了的举证责任。在反垄断方面，谷歌向它的广告商们收取的费用是通过竞拍来决定，因此对它垄断上的攻击杀伤力是有限的。它还没有和微软那样运用自己在一个市场上的统治地位去强行攻入别的市场。在版权和隐私上也存在着同样的无辜可能。例如：谷歌提供产品对书籍搜索，通过将书籍从“被人们遗忘的角落里”挽救过来，鼓励读者购买版权书籍，说它在给出版商、作者带来的是损害不如说是帮助。而且，虽然谷歌说过那些对人们将在未来做出什么选择的言论带有”独裁者“的味道，可谷歌在用户隐私方面，没有背叛用户。如果说有的话，那么谷歌要比别的竞争者在抵抗爱打探的美中政府这方面的表现要强许多。 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. 虽说如此，利益矛盾是将不可避免--尤其在隐私方面。谷歌实际上是控制着一个“表盘”。在谷歌不断把更多的服务提供给你的时候，这个‘表盘“能向两方移动。被设定在一边时，谷歌能自主地迅速地将它所收集到的任何用户信息都销毁。这将保证隐私，可是限制到了谷歌从这些关于你正从事活动的有关信息卖给广告商时候进行的赢利，使服务用途变少。如果移动到另一边，谷歌就继续保留了那些信息不被删除，那么那些服务会更有用途，但那时，可能会产生一些糟糕头顶的隐私侵犯事件。 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? 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. 答案，正如对过去银行的一样，一定是在介于两者之间的某个的地方；随着环境变化，“表盘”上正确的位置可能会改变。那将成为谷歌的公众利益所在。但是，正如银行家们（还有盖茨）所告诉我们的，公众监督同样能给谷歌的管理者们带来一个私下的挑战：他们要怎样表达自己的观点？ 一个明显存在的策略是通过更加透明，使更多流程和计划处于监督之下，来减少人们对谷歌可信赖上的担忧。但是，它还需要一次更深层次的内在变化。假想，仅仅因为你的公司的创办者是一批好的年轻小伙子们，你提供了大量服务，所以社会就无权去质疑你的动机了--这不再是一个理智的说法。 谷歌是一件资本主义者工具----并且还是一件有用的工具。依靠这一个基本事实去面对将要到来的风暴要比依靠兴许成为失败根源的一句平凡口号会更好。 |
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