模式匹配 (Pattern Matching)

Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.

欢迎回到 OneZero 每周的时事通讯 Pattern Matching ， 它将本周最引人注目的技术故事作为背景。

As the world wheezes through a pandemic, its richest are profiting as never before. Since mid-March, America’s billionaires have seen their wealth spike 25%, a gain of $755 billion in a four-month period that has left 150,000 dead and put tens of millions out of work. Tech companies and their founders have gained most of all, led by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Larry Ellison. Shares of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix have hit record highs. Bezos — the world’s richest man — got $13 billion richer on July 20 alone, thanks to an Amazon stock bump.

随着世界在大流行中喘不过气来，最富有的人正在前所未有地获利。 自3月中旬以来，美国的亿万富翁的财富飙升了25 ％，在四个月内增长了7,550亿美元，致使15万人死亡，数千万人失业。 在杰夫·贝索斯(Jeff Bezos)，马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)，比尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)，埃隆·马斯克(Elon Musk)和拉里·埃里森(Larry Ellison)的带领下， 科技公司及其创始人获得了最多的收益。 亚马逊，苹果，微软和Netflix的股票均创下历史新高。 全球首富贝索斯(Bezos)仅在7月20日就赚了130亿美元 ，这要归功于亚马逊股价的上涨。

This illustrates the degree to which Big Tech’s fortunes have decoupled from those of the rest of society. When times are good, they fend off or buy up rivals and make piles of money. When times are awful, they consolidate their market power and make even more. When you control the software platforms that dominate online communication, productivity, and commerce, you can’t lose.

这说明了Big Tech的命运与社会其他部分的脱节程度。 当时机成熟时，他们会避开或收购竞争对手并赚大钱。 当形势不景气时，它们可以巩固自己的市场力量，甚至发挥更大的作用。 当您控制主导在线交流，生产力和商业的软件平台时，您不会迷失方向。

That control is what’s at issue in a series of antitrust hearings in the U.S. House, the next of which had been scheduled for Monday but has been postponed. When the hearing does take place, Bezos will testify to Congress for the first time, alongside Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai. I’ll have more on what to expect from that landmark hearing once the new date is announced, as well as an interview with Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and an influential critic of Amazon.

在美国众议院举行的一系列反托拉斯听证会上，这种管制就是问题所在，下一次听证会原定在星期一举行，但已推迟 。 听证会举行后，贝佐斯将首次与扎克伯格，苹果公司的蒂姆·库克和谷歌的Sundar Pichai一起向国会作证。 一旦宣布了新的日期，我将有更多关于里程碑式听证会的期望，以及对本地自立学会联合主任，亚马逊的有影响力的评论家 Stacy Mitchell的采访。

In the meantime, it’s worth a closer look at some of the specific ways that a company like Amazon wields its size in the marketplace. As Mitchell notes, the consumer-focused approach to antitrust policy that has prevailed in the United States since the 1970 and ’80s holds that big does not equal bad, as long as companies harness their scale to keep prices down rather than to jack them up. No doubt Amazon does that. But a series of reports have made clear over the years that Amazon, like Apple, Facebook, and other top tech firms also leverage their size in another way: to bully smaller rivals, take their best ideas, and squeeze them out of business.

同时，值得仔细研究一下像亚马逊这样的公司在市场上发挥其规模的一些具体方式。 正如米切尔(Mitchell)指出的那样，自1970年和80年代以来，以消费者为中心的反托拉斯政策在美国盛行，只要公司利用规模降低价格而不是抬高价格，就等于不等于坏。 。 毫无疑问，亚马逊会这样做。 但是，多年来的一系列报道表明，像苹果，Facebook和其他顶级高科技公司这样的亚马逊也以另一种方式利用其规模：欺负较小的竞争对手，采用他们的最佳创意，并将其淘汰。

模式 (The Pattern)

Amazon fights dirty.

亚马逊打脏。

• Amazon is one of America’s most trusted brands. But for many startups, trusting Amazon as a business partner has turned out to be a ruinous mistake. The Wall Street Journal’s Dana Mattioli and Cara Lombardo reported this week that the Seattle giant has often used its Alexa Fund, a venture-capital fund for startups involved in voice technology, to gain access to startups’ business plans and private data, only to launch its own competing products later.

  亚马逊是美国最受信赖的品牌之一。 但是对于许多创业公司而言，将亚马逊作为业务合作伙伴却是一个毁灭性的错误。 《 华尔街日报 》的达娜·马蒂奥利(Dana Mattioli)和卡拉·伦巴多(Cara Lombardo)本周报道说，这家西雅图巨人经常利用其Alexa基金(一项涉及语音技术的初创企业的风险投资基金)来访问初创企业的商业计划和私人数据，稍后推出自己的竞争产品 。

• In some cases, Amazon ended up crushing the startup it had invested in as a result, but that was a trade-off the company could afford to make. In other cases, Amazon declined to invest at all, then simply took the idea and ran with it. An Amazon spokesperson denied to the Journal that the company uses confidential information to build competing products and characterized the spurned developers as “self-interested parties who complain rather than build.”

  在某些情况下， 亚马逊最终压垮了它所投资的初创公司 ，但这是该公司可以承受的折衷方案。 在其他情况下，亚马逊根本拒绝投资，然后简单地接受了这个想法并付诸实践。 亚马逊发言人向《 华尔街日报》否认该公司使用机密信息来制造竞争产品，并将被拒绝的开发商归类为“抱怨而不是制造的自私团体。”

• If the story sounds familiar, it’s because Amazon has a long-standing pattern of bullying, backstabbing, and bigfooting smaller business partners. Another Journal investigation by Mattioli in April found that the company routinely used its access to data about third-party sellers on Amazon.com to develop its own, competing private-label product lines — something the company had told Congress explicitly that it doesn’t do. “We knew we shouldn’t,” one former employee told the paper. “But at the same time, we are making Amazon branded products, and we want them to sell.”

  如果这个故事听起来很熟悉，那是因为亚马逊长期以来一直在欺凌，刺伤和大举小生意伙伴。 Mattioli在4月对《 华尔街日报》进行的另一项调查发现， 该公司通常使用对Amazon.com上第三方卖家数据的访问来 开发自己的竞争性自有品牌产品线 -该公司已明确告诉国会，它没有做。 一位前雇员对报纸说：“我们知道我们不应该这样做。” “但与此同时，我们正在生产亚马逊品牌的产品，我们希望它们能够销售。”

• Even Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, has become feared by third-party developers for allegedly copying and incorporating their third-party tools into its own proprietary products, Andrew Leonard reported for OneZero last year. “Because AWS has thousands of customers, the company has a godlike perspective of broad industry trends, including insight into which third-party tools are most popular,” he wrote.

  安德鲁·伦纳德(Andrew Leonard)去年在OneZero上报道， 甚至连亚马逊的云平台亚马逊网络服务(Amazon Web Services)都因涉嫌将第三方工具复制并整合到其专有产品中而 受到第三方开发人员的恐惧 。 他写道：“由于AWS拥有成千上万的客户，因此该公司对广泛的行业趋势有着令人敬畏的看法，包括了解哪种第三方工具最受欢迎。”

• The ruthlessness has deep roots in the company’s culture, according to Brad Stone’s 2013 book The Everything Store. Way back in 2009, Amazon offered to buy Quidsi, the startup behind Diapers.com. When it declined to sell, Amazon allegedly slashed prices on diapers to the point of driving the startup out of business — and then bought it. In 2017, Amazon shut Quidsi down.

  根据布拉德·斯通(Brad Stone)在2013年出版的《一切商店 》( The Everything Store)的报道， 这种无情的文化深深植根于公司的文化 。 早在2009年，亚马逊就提出收购Quipers，这是Diapers.com背后的创业公司。 亚马逊拒绝出售时，据称将尿布价格大幅下调至将初创企业停业的地步，然后又购买了。 2017年，亚马逊关闭了Quidsi 。

• None of this is to say that Amazon is uniquely unscrupulous. Facebook is famous for either copying or buying any social media startup that starts to make inroads against its dominance — with the threat of copying looming over every acquisition overture it makes. I wrote in depth in February about how Apple uses the home-field advantage of its App Store to give its own apps a leg up on third-party app developers.

  这并不是说亚马逊是唯一不道德的 。 Facebook 以复制或购买任何一家社交媒体初创公司而闻名， 这些社交媒体初创公司开始蚕食其主导地位-并威胁到其所进行的每一项收购提议都将被复制。 我在2月份深入撰写了有关Apple如何利用其App Store的本地优势来使其自己的应用程序与第三方应用程序开发者竞争的文章。

• The point is not that these companies or their leaders are evil. It’s that their ownership of dominant platforms, coupled with their sheer size and market power, allows them to both quash upstarts and expand ceaselessly into the new markets that their platforms enable. The more software eats the world, the more the dominant software companies feast. The pandemic has accelerated both.

  关键不是这些公司或其领导者是邪恶的。 正是由于他们对主导平台的所有权，再加上庞大的规模和市场力量，才使得他们既可以镇压暴发户，又可以不断地向其平台支持的新市场扩展。 越多 的软件吃世界 ，更主要的软件公司的盛宴 。 大流行加速了两者的发展。

• In the long run, that not only stifles competition and inhibits innovation, it puts the largest internet companies in absolute control of ever larger swaths of the economy and everyday life. Amazon is now a leader not only in e-commerce, but cloud infrastructure, the internet of things, face recognition, streaming media, groceries, and more. Axios reported this week that it has become America’s top advertiser. And Bloomberg reported that it has been spending record amounts on lobbying in response to the antitrust proceedings. “I think the pandemic has laid bare their incredible power in our society, and it’s undeniable now,” Mitchell told me. “Arguments that I had been making for a long time about the fact these companies have become like essential infrastructure really have proven to be the case.”

  从长远来看，这不仅扼杀了竞争并抑制了创新， 而且使最大的互联网公司完全控制着越来越大的经济和日常生活 。 亚马逊现在不仅在电子商务领域而且在云基础设施，物联网，面部识别，流媒体，杂货等方面均处于领先地位。 Axios本周报道说它已经成为美国最大的广告商 。 彭博社报道说，为了反托拉斯诉讼，它在游说方面花费了创纪录的金额 。 米切尔告诉我：“我认为这种流行病已经在我们的社会中展现了其不可思议的力量，现在不可否认，” “关于这些公司已经变得像基本基础设施的事实，我已经争论了很长时间了，事实确实如此。”

• It’s true, the pandemic has made clear just how much we’ve all come to rely on Amazon and other internet platforms. But by now, it has also made clear that their tide of success has not been lifting others’ boats — because they keep raiding those boats and cutting holes in the bottom.

  的确，大流行病清楚表明了我们所有人都对亚马逊和其他互联网平台的依赖 。 但是到现在，它也已经清楚地表明， 他们的成功之潮并没有举起其他人的船 ，因为他们不断袭击那些船并在船底挖Kong。

暗流 (Undercurrents)

Under-the-radar trends, stories, and random anecdotes worth your time

雷达下的趋势，故事和随机轶事值得您花费时间

• Slack has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft. The workplace chat company, which has been losing its edge over Microsoft Teams, alleges that Microsoft is competing unfairly by bundling Teams with its Office productivity software, the Washington Post reports. The timing is noteworthy, given that Microsoft is the only one of the five biggest tech firms not included so far in U.S. antitrust investigations. The Post’s Jay Greene had a good piece last month looking at how Microsoft has stayed out of trouble since its famous antitrust case in the late 1990s.

  Slack已针对微软提起反托拉斯诉讼。 据《 华盛顿邮报》报道 ，这家工作场所聊天公司一直在与Microsoft Teams失去竞争优势，该公司声称Microsoft通过将Teams与Office办公软件捆绑在一起进行不公平的竞争。 鉴于微软是迄今未包括在美国反托拉斯调查中的五家最大的科技公司之一，因此这一时机值得注意。 邮报的杰伊·格林(Jay Greene) 自上世纪1990年代末著名的反托拉斯案以来， 微软在上个月一直如何避免麻烦 。

• Two clickbait companies merged, and what the DOJ did next will astound you. Just kidding: The DOJ announced this week that it won’t block the deal to combine Taboola and Outbrain, which run those “Around the Web” and “You May Like” ad chumboxes that clutter websites. No word on what one weird trick they used to get the merger past regulators.

  两家clickbait公司合并了，司法部接下来的工作会让您大吃一惊。 只是开个玩笑：美国司法部本周宣布，它不会阻止将Taboola和Outbrain合并的交易，后者经营那些“ 杂乱无章的网络”和“您可能会喜欢”的广告chumbox，使网站混乱。 对于他们用来使合并通过监管机构的一种怪异技巧，我们一言不发。

• Doctors are using A.I. to help make decisions about patient care. What’s concerning, according to a report from STAT (login required), is that the A.I. tools are unproven, and patients often aren’t informed that they’re being used.

  医生正在使用AI帮助做出有关患者护理的决策。 根据STAT的一份报告(需要登录) ，令人担心的是AI工具未经验证，并且通常不会通知患者正在使用它们。

• Let’s not put the federal government in charge of verifying social media users’ identities and citizenship. Former Facebook VP Sam Lessin made that proposal in The Information, suggesting that a government stamp for verified U.S. citizens online could be a useful tool to counter foreign manipulation and moderate online speech. Glitch CEO Anil Dash posted an extremely convincing rebuttal on his blog, one that’s worth reading even if you were already inclined to disagree with Lessin’s idea.

  不要让联邦政府负责验证社交媒体用户的身份和公民身份。 前Facebook副总裁萨姆·莱辛(Sam Lessin) 在《信息报》中提出了这一建议，建议在网上为经过核实的美国公民盖上政府印章可能是对抗外国操纵和温和的在线言论的有用工具。 Glitch首席执行官Anil Dash在他的博客上发表了令人信服的反驳 ，即使您已经倾向于不同意Lessin的想法，也值得一读。

本周头条 (Headlines of the Week)

The Inflatable Pool Is the Official Symbol of America’s Lost Summer

充气游泳池是美国迷失夏日的官方象征

— Maura Judkis, Washington Post

— 华盛顿邮报的莫拉·朱迪克斯

There’s a Name for Tech’s Attitude Problem: Toxic Positivity

技术的态度问题有个名字：有毒的阳性

— Owen Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle

— 旧金山纪事报 Owen Thomas

Mark Zuckerberg Scholars Tell Us What Makes This Image a ‘Rare Zuck’

马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)学者告诉我们是什么使该图像成为“稀有祖克”

— Kevin Truong, Motherboard

－ Kevin Truong， 主板

Thanks for reading Pattern Matching. Reach me with tips and feedback by responding to this post on the web, via Twitter direct message at @WillOremus, or by email at oremus@medium.com.

感谢您阅读模式匹配。 通过在Web上回复该帖子，通过Twitter直邮@WillOremus或通过电子邮件oremus@medium.com与我联系，以获取提示和反馈。