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【speed】
Battle of the internet giants
Survival of the biggest
Concern about the clout of the internet giants is growing. But antitrust watchdogs should tread carefully
Dec 1st 2012 | from the print edition
【time 1】
THE four giants of the internet age—Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon—are extraordinary creatures. Never before has the world seen firms grow so fast or spread their tentacles so widely. Apple has become a colossus of capitalism, accounting for 4.3% of the value of the S& 500 and 1.1% of the global equity market. Some 425m people now use its iTunes online store, whose virtual shelves are packed to the gills with music and other digital content. Google, meanwhile, is the undisputed global leader in search and online advertising. Its Android software powers three-quarters of the smartphones being shipped. Amazon dominates the online-retail and e-book markets in many countries; less well known is its behind-the-scenes power in cloud computing. As for Facebook, if the social network’s one billion users were a country, it would be the world’s third largest.
The digital revolution these giants have helped foment has brought huge benefits to consumers and businesses, and promoted free speech and the spread of democracy along the way. Yet they provoke fear as well as wonder. Their size and speed can, if left unchecked, be used to choke off competition. That is why they are attracting close scrutiny from regulators.
Google is the one most under threat. Both the European Commission and America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have been investigating allegations that it has unfairly manipulated its search results to favour its own services. The company also stands accused of several other transgressions, including using patents to stymie competition in the smartphone market. The regulators want Google, which disputes the charges, to change its practices. If talks fail—they were still continuing as The Economist went to press—the search firm could end up mired in costly legal fights on both sides of the Atlantic. This could become the defining antitrust battle of the internet age, just as Microsoft’s epic fight a decade ago—over its bundling of its web-browser with its Windows operating system—defined the personal-computer era.
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【time 2】
Why size matters
Three trends alarm those who think the digital giants are becoming too powerful for consumers’ good. The first is the rise of winner-take-almost-all markets on the internet. Although Microsoft has poured money into its rival search engine, Bing, Google still accounts for over two-thirds of searches undertaken in America and a whopping 90% or so of them in some European markets. Facebook, too, enjoys a quasi-monopoly in the social-networking arena. Rivals fear that the big four will exploit their dominant status in their main businesses to gain an unfair advantage in other areas—a charge that lies at the heart of the antitrust case against Google.
Second, the giants want to get consumers hooked on their own “platforms”—combinations of online services and apps that run on smartphones and tablet computers. These platforms can be very appealing. Apple mints money because its hugely profitable iPhone has, in effect, become a remote control for many people’s digital lives. But there are worries that Apple and its peers are creating “walled gardens” which make it hard for users to move content from one platform to another.
The third concern is the internet behemoths’ habit of gobbling up promising firms before they become a threat. Amazon, which raised $3 billion in a rare bond issue this week, has splashed out on firms such as Zappos, an online shoe retailer that had ambitions to rival it. Facebook and Google have made big acquisitions too, such as Instagram and AdMob, some of which have drawn intense scrutiny from regulators.
So far the watchdogs have focused on surgical strikes, in areas such as online search and the e-book market (where Apple is under investigation for alleged cartel-like behaviour with several publishers). Their goal has been to get swift settlements with negotiated remedies that curtail bad behaviour.
【300】
【time 3】
Some critics think that is too weak. There have been calls for Google to be chopped up into two independent firms, severing its search business from its other activities. Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and consultant to the FTC, has even argued that in the interests of promoting competition, big “information monopolies” such as Apple and Google should be forced to choose between being providers of digital content, producers of hardware or information distributors (via such things as cloud-computing services).
The danger is that such corporate butchery would do more harm than good. The fact that people have flocked to big web firms’ platforms suggests that consumers are perfectly willing to trade some openness for convenience and ease-of-use. And if they do want to change providers, the cost of doing so has fallen dramatically in the broadband era. Switching to a new search engine or music service takes a matter of seconds. And this time, rather than there being one dominant player (as Microsoft was for a while), there is a war of all against all (see article).
Smartphones powered by Google’s Android operating system have come from nowhere to dominate the market, eclipsing Apple’s iPhone. Amazon’s Kindle tablet is going head-to-head with the iPad. In social networking Google+ is fighting Facebook. And Facebook and Apple, along with Microsoft, now have designs on Google’s dominance in search. Smaller firms such as Twitter are also keen to join the giants’ ranks, and have rebuffed marriage offers from them. Facebook itself was a start-up just eight years ago.
Schumpeter 2.0
Indeed, the tech world is changing so fast that it brings to mind Joseph Schumpeter’s comment about the “perennial gale of creative destruction” that sweeps through economies as innovative insurgents take on entrenched incumbents. Microsoft’s antitrust problems now seem less vital than the fact that, even while it tangled with regulators, the giant squid failed to sense that the commercial currents had shifted against it. The four big fish nowadays also have a reputation for arrogance and plenty of enemies. If they really want to keep the trustbusters at bay, they should not let their size go to their heads.
【361】
Taxes
The Other Side of Warren Buffett’s Common Sense Tax Argument
By Christopher MatthewsNov. 29, 20126 Comments
【time 4】
Over the years, Warren Buffett has gotten a lot of miles out of his folksy charm and ability to distill elaborate financial concepts into plain English. And recently, proponents of higher tax rates for the wealthy have gotten a lot of miles out of those qualities too — as the world’s fourth richest man has advocated repeatedly for just that policy. This week, Mr. Buffett was at it again — this time in the New York Times Op-Ed section — calling for, among other things, a higher capital gains tax rate.
For years, capital gains have generally been taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income, partly in order to spur investment. The idea is that if taxpayers spend their money by investing in wealth-creating enterprises, then we’ll all be better off than we’d be if they simply spent their money consuming luxury goods or expensive vacations.
But Warren Buffett took aim at this logic, writing:
“Suppose that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.”
Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist.”
Basically, Buffett is arguing that investors will invest, regardless of what portion the government takes out of their profit after the fact — and that we shouldn’t worry about using the tax code to encourage investment. Instead, he suggests, we should worry that a lower capital gains rate is unfair to those who make most of their income from labor, which is taxed at a higher rate under current law. It’s this wrinkle in the tax code, after all, that allowed Mitt Romney to pay such low effective tax rates in 2010 and 2011.
【338】
【time 5】
So who is right? Economists on the left — like Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden — argue that the evidence shows that higher capital gains tax rates do not lead to less investment. In a blog post last summer, Bernstein cited several studies which show that changes in the capital gains rate had negligible effects on investment. He wrote:
“There are a few economic principles that we consistently get wrong in ways that do lasting damage to our economy and diminish our future. At the top of this list are arguments about large behavioral responses to changes in tax rates. I don’t think it’s zero, but I’ve simply never seen compelling evidence that tax increases significantly hurt growth, labor supply, jobs, wages, or that rate decreases provide much of a boost the other way.”
Conservatives tend to respond that the reason it’s difficult to demonstrate empirically the negative effects of higher capital gains taxes is that economies are huge, complex beasts full of moving parts. The dramatic economic growth of the internet boom, for instance, may have drowned out the disincentives of higher capital gains taxes when President Clinton briefly raised them in the 1990s — but that doesn’t mean that negative effects didn’t exist.
Another conservative line of argument is that capital gains taxes raise the cost of capital for companies. Firms get equity capital from the stock market by issuing shares. If dividends and capital gains on those shares are taxed at a higher rate, then the value of those shares to investors will decrease — and as a result corporations won’t be able to raise as much money and will have less money to build factories and hire employees.
Finally, conservatives say that capital gains and dividend taxes are examples of “double taxation.” When a firm whose stock you own pays a dividend, that dividend came out of corporate earnings that have already been taxed. And when you sell a stock and realize a gain, it’s quite possible that you bought that stock with money that was already taxed as labor income. If you’re a moderately wealthy wage earner already paying a high income tax rate, and then face the prospect of paying that same high rate on investment returns, you may not leave your money in a bank account (as Buffett’s scenario lampoons), but it’s not hard to imagine such people deciding to spend that money on luxury goods instead. Why get taxed twice?
【411】
【剩余】
Of course this example of moderately well-off wage earners doesn’t represent the majority of investors. Many investors are, like Mitt Romney, already wealthy and simply reinvesting investment income which was taxed at a lower rate. And many more are invested in the stock market through 401(k) plans, which are funded with pre-tax wages.
Nobody likes taxes. They’re are a necessary evil — the only way we can fund government. But given the state of the middle class in this country, it would seem that higher taxes on capital gains — which hit mostly the rich — are one of the more palatable ways we can raise the revenue we need to bring the budget deficit under control. So while Warren Buffett does oversimplify the case for increasing capital gains, the essence of his argument stands up to scrutiny. If we raise capital gains taxes just a bit, or even change the code so that they match the rates of ordinary income, there will still be investors ready to take advantage of winning investment ideas.
【171】
【obstacle】
Small Business
Shred the Punchcards: Belly Updates Customer Loyalty Programs
By Sarah MaxNov. 29, 2012Add a Comment
Jake Dickson, owner of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats wanted to create a loyalty plan for customers who come to his New York City butcher shops for everything from housemade hot dogs to locally-sourced artisanal meat. “For my business, it didn’t make sense to have a classic punchcard,” says Dickson, who runs two stores, one in the Chelsea Market and one in Tribeca.
So when a representative from customer loyalty program Belly came into the store about six months ago, Dickson was all ears. “I usually kick out sales people when they walk in,” he says. “This time I jumped on it.”
Launched in August 2011, Belly is a rewards program that lets small merchants customize their frequent-shopper perks and, perhaps more importantly, get better insight into when and what their customers are buying. After a free 30-day trial, merchants pay $50 to $100 for the program, which includes a dedicated iPad for tracking customer visits and rewards.
Customers carry a single card that works at all participating merchants, or they can simply download the Belly app and swipe their smartphone. At Dickson’s, customers get five points for every purchase, whether it’s a $5 hot dog or a $50 cut of meat. When they get to 30 points they earn a free hot dog. At 120 points they get all the beef jerky they can grab with one hand. Customers who manage to accumulate 1,500 points will have a cut of steak named in their honor.
Until recently, ma and pa shops didn’t have a whole lot of options when it came to bringing traffic into stores, tracking consumer behavior, or enticing people to keep coming back. That’s changed dramatically in the past couple of years as startups and established players alike vie to bring offline merchants into the digital space. Belly is hardly alone in its campaign to reinvent the old paper punchcard. Google has brought its own customer-loyalty program, Punchd, into the fold, and last June mobile-payment company Square also launched a digital loyalty program.
Yet, Belly has managed to grow quickly. Backed by $12.5 million in funding from the likes of Chicago venture firm Lightbank and industry powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz, the company now employs 100 people – roughly half of them in sales and account management – and is in 3,500 businesses in about 10 primary markets. More than 600,000 customers are active Belly users, collectively logging more than a million swipes per month in everything from cupcake shops and high-end restaurants to doggy day care. In the last month Belly expanded into Atlanta, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. It’s now making inroads in Denver, Portland, and Seattle.
Founder Logan LaHive admits that Belly wasn’t born out of some great “ah-ha” moment. Rather, “it was much more about identifying a problem and working through a long process of pitching and testing,” says LaHive. Having worked as director of new business at DVD-rental company RedBox Automated Retail, LaHive says he had a pretty good understanding of “how to use hardware to disrupt the retail experience.” He’d been working on an idea to use mobile games to promote local businesses and pitched it to Lightbank, whose co-founders, Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, launched Groupon. Turns out, they were working on a related idea, which they called Bellyflop.
“They didn’t like my idea, and I didn’t like theirs,” says LaHive of their first meeting. “But we liked each other.” Lightbank hired LaHive as a founder in residence, and together they came up with what is now Belly. “We dropped the flop for obvious reasons,” says LaHive.
At the same time Belly has a sales force knocking on doors in key markets, its own happy customers are helping spread the word. “We’ve given them quite a few leads,” says Rey Garza, co-owner of Sweetcakes, a cupcake shop and bakery in Redwood City, Calif. The program, he says, is much cleaner than a punchcard.
Although Belly was designed for independent merchants, the company is piloting its program with some large franchises, including Ben & Jerry’s, McDonald’s, Subway, and Chick Fil-A. It’s also working on tapping its growing network of merchants to cross promote businesses with what it calls Belly Bites. Now in private beta in Chicago, it will offer freebies to Belly cardholders to get them to try new spots.
While most Belly merchants stick with pretty standard rewards, some have gotten creative with such high-point perks as shaving the barber’s beard or giving the comic book seller a punch in the stomach. At Nature’s Pet Market in Portland, just 10 points earns a free belly rub for your dog or cat.
At Sweetcakes, Garza is keeping it simple. No frosting in the face or all the cupcakes you can grab. Instead, repeat customers get one free mini cupcake for every four visits. Most seem to think it’s a pretty sweet deal.
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发表于 2012-11-30 23:30:44
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