What Washington does – or doesn’t do – to promote alternative energy may mean less and less at a time of a global shift in thought.
看文章最后一段话,What Washington does – or doesn’t do – to promote alternative energy may mean less and less at a time of a global shift in thought.我在课上反复强调过,考研很少用government这个单词,因为在英文当中government是个非常大而全的。美国的政府其实指的是administration,只是一个行政职能部门。大的政府其实包含了立法权、行政权、司法权。这里这个Washington指的是川普,就是行政部门。无论他在推动新能源方面做与不做,这都是一个全世界的大势所趋,这也是我们整个文章的一个主题。
我们再来看第三篇文章,谈到最近几年考得特别多的信息安全,或者是个人隐私安全的问题。
The power and ambition of these companies 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 tracery of its users’ friendships and social lives.
文章开头通过一个例子,谈到有一个公司收购了另外一个互联网公司,其目的不仅仅是它有很多的连锁实体店,更多的是因为它能够购买它的客户信息。我记得第一题选的就是客户信息。
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 to Amazon of Whole Foods is not so much the 460 shops it owns, or the distribution network, but the records of which customers have purchased what.
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 operate a virtual duopoly in digital advertising to the detriment of all other media and entertainment companies.
然后第二题谈到Facebook脸书一反常态,没有遵守它的诺言。那出现了问题怎么办呢?有Competition law,类似于反垄断或者竞争法。题目问的是这个竞争法到底怎么样了呢?文章中But it is clumsy,说这个是可以用来解决不平衡问题的,但是大的方向上不好。这个方案它也不接地气,答案应该是无法应对快速变化的市场节奏。