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The United States has gained enormous benefits in the world by relying on Internet giants, but now it has to be vigilant about the problems of the new stage of "Internet capitalism".
On January 6, 2022, candles were placed outside the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the first anniversary of the Capitol Hill riots
◇ Facebook founder Zuckerberg named the 2021 "Villain of the Year"
◇ Internet companies have too much power and do not have to bear too much responsibility, in fact, they have become the rule-makers of network public opinion
◇ Internet platforms turn responsibility into power, as long as it can be interpreted as the need for supervision, the platform has the power to delete content at will
◇ After the Internet platform as a new channel replaces the traditional commercial channel, it is easier to use its own information advantages to expand the "asymmetry"
◇ Its regulatory direction does not go deep into the fundamentals of the principle of information dissemination, but focuses on non-critical issues such as privacy protection and anti-monopoly
There are two things that make the United States the most special capitalist country. One is the global financial payment system and the other is the global Internet. Relying on these two, the United States has formed a dollar hegemony and an Internet hegemony, respectively.
Based on the need for convenient and reliable electronic financial payment systems for the development of the global economy, multinational banks cooperated in establishing the SWIFT International Settlement System in 1973. This system should have been open, neutral, and decentralized, but due to the special nature of financial credit, the United States used its national strength advantage to quickly promote the dollar into a major global currency, using the oil trade that is almost needed by all countries in the world. The dollar now accounts for 60 to 70 percent of global foreign exchange reserves, even though the U.S. gdp accounts for only about a quarter of the world's GDP.
The global Internet should have been as decentralized as the telephone system, but from a technical point of view, the Internet originated from the United States, and the domain name management of the Internet architecture based on the TCP/IP protocol required a central structure such as a root server, and the root servers were distributed in the United States in the early days. It was not until 2016, when the U.S. Department of Commerce transferred domain name management to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit international organization, that the United States no longer had a central position in global Internet governance.
The hegemonic position of the United States in the global Internet field is not determined by the technical framework. Software companies on top of the Internet are the more critical factor.
In search, social, e-commerce, media, entertainment and other fields, the US Internet giants occupy a monopolistic global market share. The door of the global multinational Internet market is open, and American companies are allowed to occupy it at will. For example, in the global search market, Google and Bing in the United States account for more than 85% of the share. After 2010, American Internet companies have far left other types of companies, including some giants with unimaginable market capitalizations, such as Google, Amazon, and About $1 trillion in market capitalization.
Internet hegemony, like the dollar hegemony, has become an extremely important fundamental of the US economy, making the United States widen the gap with other developed countries. In a sense, it can be said that the American-style capitalist system has evolved to the stage of "Internet capitalism".
Internet companies are not ordinary companies, but the deep infrastructure of social development. While the Internet has profoundly changed the life of global society, it has also deeply impacted the political and economic systems of many countries.
In recent years, many countries around the world have launched antitrust campaigns against US Internet giants, typically the EUROPEAN Union's huge fine of $2.7 billion against Google in 2017. Today, there are also many doubts about Internet companies in the United States, and Facebook founder Zuckerberg was even named the 2021 "Evil Man of the Year".
The hegemony of the platform
On the first anniversary of the us Capitol Hill riots, some media once again proposed that whether it was the anger that instigated the people at that time to promote the escalation of violence, or the subsequent ban and suspension of words, it showed that the Internet management principles in the United States could not adapt to reality after years of practice, which was concentrated in the fact that Internet companies had too much power and did not have to bear too much responsibility, in fact, they became "network public opinion rule-makers".
At the beginning of the rise of the Internet, there was a new thing like "platform" in the United States. The United States has also been controversial about some users posting indecent content on the platform. The United States Congress brought the issue under the jurisdiction of the Telecommunications Act in 1996. Among them, the influential social platform 230 clause stipulates that the platform is not responsible for the content posted by the user.
The reason for this clause was that it was considered technically impossible for Internet platforms to supervise content in real time, and if the platform was to be responsible for content, it would greatly increase the cost.
This Article 230 is critical to the development of Internet platforms. In addition to obscene and pornographic personal attacks and other content, users also uploaded a lot of infringing content, including audio, video, text and other content with clear copyrights.
For such issues, the United States has introduced a "safe harbor principle" after discussion: the platform does not need to be responsible for the copyright-infringing content uploaded by the user without knowing it, but if someone comes to sue, the platform needs to delete the relevant content and protect the copyright.
This gives Internet platforms an excuse to pretend not to know, but in fact rely on a large amount of infringing content to attract users. The company that owns the copyright initiates the protection of rights, and the platform only deletes the matter and will not be fined. In this case, some blatantly infringing websites were successfully listed in the Internet frenzy of the late 1990s and even "sick" financing.
Due to the serious infringement and the occurrence of bad incidents such as the upload of child pornography to the platform, the US political circles have negotiated a "red flag principle": if there is a "well-known" illegal behavior on the platform, which appears prominently in the Internet environment like a red flag, then the platform needs to be immediately regulated, and can not find an excuse to say that it is the responsibility of the user.
But in practice, internet platforms turn this responsibility into power — as long as it can be interpreted as requiring regulation, platforms have the power to delete content at will.
A review of history shows that there are serious deviations in the principles of Internet platform regulation that the U.S. government gradually developed in the late 1990s. The reason for this is not only the US government's contempt for the influence of new things, but also its motivation to use the Internet platform to promote the concept of "freedom" around the world, and the role of emerging capital groups in lobbying and guiding.
Because of deviations in regulatory principles and even the power provided by Internet companies, the US Internet platform has been able to catch almost all benefits. Traditional media and content companies can only initiate rights protection against copyright infringements that internet platforms really can't say, and can't stop the growth and development of Internet platforms.
Now, american Internet platform companies have become giants, gradually penetrating into all aspects of life.
They are a display platform for audio, video, and text content, and at the same time hold the right to publish information. Under the interpretation of existing legal provisions, Internet platform companies can arbitrarily infringe on freedom of expression and eliminate opponents. Theoretically, users can go to other places to exercise "freedom", but due to the increasing influence of Internet platforms, they have themselves become the main body of the public opinion field.
They have become an alternative channel for a variety of business practices, and the massive user data on the platform has extremely high business value. The advertising revenue of the US Internet platform has surpassed that of the traditional platform, and its revenue upward trend is continuing, and the revenue is concentrated in a few head companies. Competitors can't afford to fight because of the high cost of technology and customer acquisition.
The US Internet platform giants have established multiple "technical barriers" such as cloud services, hardware systems, operating systems, and application software, and can establish platform hegemony with simple operations. While the U.S. constitutional system ostensibly protects "freedom of speech," Internet platforms have actual powers beyond the law.
This creates a paradox: regulation aims to protect free speech and copyright, and eliminate undesirable content, but in the end it is used by Internet giants as a tool for their platform hegemony.
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The Internet has brought mankind into the information age, and people's ability to obtain information has developed rapidly. But in the United States, the information age has not raised the level of public awareness, and the Internet platform has made people more distorted and paranoid.
The most obvious is the problem of "information cocooning". Some people's psychological bias is magnified by Internet platforms. After the platform induction, some people only heard what they wanted to hear, and their beliefs became more and more firm. The differences between Democratic and Republican voters in the United States on some value tendencies could have been merged, but these differences were exploited, solidified by some politicians, and then misled on the Internet platform. It can be said that the biggest change in the domestic politics of the United States since the new century has been the great division of the basic groups of The Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and the Internet platform has aggravated this division.
Another big problem is "extremist tendencies". Due to the problems in basic education, a large number of people in the United States do not have sufficient logical discernment ability. In the past, under the one-way transmission mode of traditional media, society generally respected the knowledge of a small number of elites, so it was still able to maintain basic logic and style. However, on the Internet platform, information dissemination has become two-way instant feedback, and the interaction of the crowd has increased. People have found that the more simple and easy to understand the extreme views, the more they can "circle fans". For example, sexual minorities have used the values of the Democratic Party to launch some extremist movements, gradually forming some social taboos and increasingly influential in society. The Basic Republican Party does not talk about science and believes in conspiracy theories on vaccines. Instead of bridging the divisions and conflicts among American voters, Internet platforms have exacerbated divisions. People find their own "satisfactory" sources of information on the Internet, such as the QAnon organization with strong conspiracy theories and cult characteristics, which leads to frequent chaos at the bottom of American society.
On the Internet platform, the shortcomings of the overall low level of education of the American people have been magnified, and the elite group is unable to cope. For example, for rumors, traditional media can still have some bottom line to debunk rumors, but the operation on the Internet platform is much more complicated.
The foundation of the American political system is the basic rationality of the electorate. In the past, although the two parties were opposed, there were also some tacit understandings, such as the manipulation of the media to maintain the basic rationality of the voters. After the Internet became an increasingly important foundation of the social system, more and more uncontrollable extreme factors were introduced, voter rationality gave way to extremes, and the United States was also caught in a clear institutional crisis.
The ditch is broken
The Internet is infrastructure, and its main economic value is channels.
Channel is one of the most central words of the capitalist commodity economy, and its essential feature is to create "information asymmetry". Channels that uphold capitalist logic establish "asymmetrical" information superiority at both ends and widen this asymmetry. On the one hand, it must maintain its information superiority over producers; on the other hand, it must maintain its information superiority over consumers. If the producer cannot reach the consumer, the product or service cannot be sold; the consumer has limited time and energy, and usually only consumes according to the method arranged by channel. Faced with powerful channels, consumers and producers are often powerless to resist.
Channels need vitality, but also introduce "the temptation of the devil". Channels will induce consumer irrationality, so that the entire production-consumption link will generate more gross profits; channels will also squeeze producers and extract more benefits in the profit distribution link.
After the Internet platform as a new channel replaces the traditional business channel, it is easier to use its own information advantages to expand the "asymmetry".
For example, if a merchant wants to open a store on the Amazon platform, he needs to pay a monthly service fee, a product sales commission, logistics fees, etc. At present, the commission of most categories on the US station is 15% of the price of the product, and the commission of individual categories will be different.
Apple has also gained a lot in the Internet business with the help of mobile phone hardware and operating system entrance. It creates a "information asymmetry" model through monopoly is even more ferocious: under the pretext of system security, users are not allowed to install apps from official websites or third-party channels, but can only be installed from the Apple App Store, and Apple takes a 30% discount.
The channel profit sharing game is part of the market economy, but the channel construction needs freedom, and it should not be artificially blocked to create a monopoly.
Supervisor Yes No Alignment
Today, the U.S. government is also aware of the internal side effects of the Internet, and calls for greater regulation are growing, very different from the relaxed atmosphere of the 1990s. At present, its regulatory direction does not go deep into the fundamentals of the principle of information dissemination, but focuses on non-critical issues such as privacy protection and anti-monopoly.
Because of the traditional emphasis on personal privacy, the United States has launched a targeted campaign against the misuse of user information by Internet platforms, and Facebook has become the biggest target. However, no matter how well the protection of stable privacy is done, it cannot solve the big problems such as users falling into an information cocoon and becoming increasingly irrational.
The United States has a rich antitrust history and has played a positive role. AT&T and IBM were either split or asked to loosen technical restrictions, and Microsoft was also subject to antitrust investigations in the late 1990s and nearly split. In recent years, Facebook and Google have also been subject to antitrust lawsuits by the US Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, respectively. Some public opinion believes that the United States has once again reached the cycle of "vigorously engaging in anti-monopoly every 20 years". However, the power of The Power of Internet Platform Companies in the United States comes from the loopholes in the early regulatory system, which cannot be solved by commercial practices such as anti-monopoly, but needs to accurately define the operation behavior of Internet platforms.
For years, there have been cases of politicians and Internet platforms using each other in the United States. This mutual exploitation did not wake up the United States until the Capitol Hill riots. Today, the regulatory challenge is not only to constrain the power of Internet platforms, but also to reflect on their intersection with politics.