The good times for the world’s tech giants are over. America’s four tech giants, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, are facing one of the toughest antitrust investigations in the history of the Internet. The State Administration for Market Supervision also points to the monopolistic behavior of these Internet platforms. A global anti-monopoly tide is surging and the effects can be felt in the field of science and technology and the Internet.
According to incomplete statistics, in the past four years, large-scale technology enterprises have encountered anti-monopoly investigations and disputes in 17 countries and regions, with a total of 84 cases. Google had the most, with 27, followed by Amazon and Apple, with 22 each, and followed by Facebook, with 13 investigations against them. Google alone has paid more than $9 billion over the past three years in antitrust penalties imposed by the European Union. China’s anti-monopoly campaign also began in 2021. In April, State Administration for Market Supervision fined Alibaba 18.228 billion yuan, which is 4% of Alibaba’s sales (455.712 billion yuan) in China in 2019. It is the largest antitrust fine in Chinese history.
The global situation is no different. The development of the entire Internet is moving towards regional separation and even getting gradually disconnected. At the same time, corporations and governments are reaching agreements exceptionally and coincidentally in regards to the antitrust issues. Emerging-market economies, in particular, are getting increasingly aware that the potential monopolies of tech giants undermine markets and fair trade.
Privacy Protection Is Becoming An Important Factor In Antitrust Enforcement
With the continuous development of digital economy, two areas of privacy protection and anti-monopoly began to cross and merge. In terms of the impact of antitrust on privacy protection, competition pressures, including privacy protection, companies might be pushed to strengthen privacy protection, but opening up competitive data elements could weaken privacy protection. On the other hand, considering the influence of privacy on antitrust, privacy protection can enhance the competitive vitality of digital economy, especially in non-price dimensions, but privacy protection may restrict the competitive factors, such as the opening and sharing of data.
Much of the behavior of Internet platforms is data behavior, resulting in competition, privacy, security and other issues. Digital platform has become a new driving force of economic growth, but due to the asymmetric collection and use of user data information, “algorithm discrimination” is a matter of concern for many.
Privacy Computing Power Has Become The Core Of Industrial Long-Term Development
Under the situation of tight global data supervision, the difficulty of data acquisition restricts the business development of the demander, and the enterprise needs to provide the solution for safe data flow. How to take into account the data availability and privacy security protection, realize the massive data flow while protecting the data privacy security, and prevent the sensitive information leakage, has become the industry’s core concern. The existing data privacy protection schemes mainly aim at the protection of static data, focus on the relatively isolated application scenarios and technical points, and propose solutions to the specific problems in the given application scenarios, but fail to protect the data in calculation and analysis.
Privacy computing can solve the problem of data security in the process of dynamic use and sharing of data, and realize that data can be invisible when using and value can be mobile without leaking data out, and information between multi-services can be shared safely and in compliance.
PlatON: A New Generation Of Privacy Computing Platform
PlatON’s mission is to provide the next generation of Internet-based protocols with the core feature of “computing interoperability”, based on the basic properties of the blockchain and supported by the privacy computing network. PlatON’s privacy AI open-source framework Rosetta aims to make it possible for engineers in the big data and AI fields to use all kinds of privacy computing technologies without any barriers, while categorizing different privacy requirements from the perspective of data privacy and supporting the most cost-effective privacy computing algorithms. For example, the user who is sensitive to the data content, can carry on the irreversible anonymous protection through the encryption means. If the user is strict to the data protection request, it may consider scarifying the convenience and realizing the omni-directional anonymity.
The results of PlatON’s privacy computing are slowly coming to market, with the company’s privacy Token contract officially opening source in 2021, it aims at helping eco-developers and partners hide information about both parties in their products and PlatON through the privacy Token contract standard. Exploring how to combine privacy protection technology with AI, many mainstream organizations are entering the battlefield, the market space is very large, PlatON invests a lot in the local battlefield, occupying the advantage.
Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Sahyadri Times journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.
