シャドーイング練習: Nishad Sanzagiri | Technology Empires Debate | Proposition (1/6) - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ
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We will now move to the motion before the House tonight,
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which is, this House believes that tech empires threaten society.
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I now look to the first speaker, the Director of Press, Nishad Sansegiri, St. Anthony's College, to open the case for the proposition.
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Thank you, Madam President.
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I'm humbled to be standing before you in this August chamber and honored to open the case for the proposition
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on such an important and topical issue.
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In the past couple of decades, the proliferation of Internet technologies has drastically altered every facet of life.
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It has completely transformed how we communicate with each other, what we purchase and buy, and how we gather information.
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This has been brought about by a few companies who embraced the early potential of readily available internet
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and converted it into helpful insight and, well, lots of wealth.
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No one on this side of the motion is aiming to claim that these companies, companies like Google, like Amazon,
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Facebook, Microsoft, are inherently and completely evil.
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But the fact is that as the years have gone by, these companies have become large, and so has their influence and power.
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As the early Internet pioneer and MIT researcher Ethan Zuckerman recently wrote, it's obvious now that what we did was a fiasco.
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So let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble.
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Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for us to call the world's tech empires to account.
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In the span of just a decade, firms such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon have risen to be the biggest companies on the planet
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and have amassed a wealth of power that threatens us all.
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They distort our democratic processes, they stockpile our data, and exercise undue sway over our markets.
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It's no surprise that we are then in the midst of a backlash, or to use the more fashionable term, tech-lash, against these technology giants.
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Today, I have three main arguments in support of the motion that I would like to explore for you.
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First, that these tech empires are ludicrously big and growing exponentially.
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Second, that they are anti-competitive and have created an oligopoly.
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And finally, that they are damaging to a democracy.
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I hope that you will take these points to heart
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when you walk down that historic door at the end of this debate and cast your vote.
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But before I go ahead and convince you that the rise of these tech empires threatens our society,
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it falls on me to introduce the opposition speakers for tonight's debate.
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Speaking first is Cecilia Zao, a first-year geographer at St. Catharines College.
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Now, I hear that Cecilia is a boxer, and although I do know that this was the very chamber that Town vs. Gown took place last week,
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I do hope that if she loses this motion tonight, she won't try to settle the score in that other way.
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Our second speaker is Matt Warman, MP, who was the former technology editor of The Telegraph
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and currently serves as a conservative party politician and co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on broadband and digital communication.
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I hope that he will join us in agreeing with the leader of his own party, who mentioned last week at Davos
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that tech companies need to seriously tackle how their technology can be used by those who wish to do us harm.
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And finally, closing the motion for the opposition is Catherine Parsons, co-founder and co-CEO of Decoded, a startup which runs courses in programming.
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Now, given that Ms. Parsons has already been in the news for imposing a company-wide email ban, stating that replying to emails took too much time out of a day,
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I'm happy to report that when the union got in touch with her with the invitation to speak at this debate, she did respond to us rather promptly.
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Jokes aside, I look forward to what I know will be a rigorous and challenging debate.
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Madam President, these are your guests, and they're most welcome.
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The fact that with a combined market value of $3 trillion, four of the five most valuable publicly traded firms in the world,
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our technology companies ought to give us cause for concern.
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In the final quarter of 2017, the five biggest technology firms, or the frightful five as the New York Times likes to call them,
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which includes Google's parent Alphabet and companies like Amazon,
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Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, have had their combined quarterly revenues at 143 billion US dollars, which is greater than the GDP of most countries.
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I mean, just take the data compiled by NGO Global Justice Now,
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which highlights that Apple's revenues in 2015 were greater than those of countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia.
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And these massive revenues are then turned into huge profits.
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In fact, all the statistics associated with these tech companies are humongous.
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Well, except for the tax records.
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Now, these tech firms invest hardly anything in the actual creation of content, which is usually always user-generated, which helps their ludicrous profit margins.
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Today, Google's profit margin is nearly twice as much as that of CBS, a traditional content creator.
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Even Goldman Sachs has found itself in the rather awkward position
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of being baffled by the astonishing profit margins these monopolies have reaped in recent years.
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A 2016 Goldman Sachs report says, and I quote, we are always very for guiding for mean reversion,
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but if we are wrong and high margins manage to endure for the next few years, particularly when global demand growth is below trend,
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there are wider questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism.
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Ladies and gentlemen, you know there's something seriously threatening about the rise these tech firms
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when they scare Goldman Sachs against the idea of capitalism.
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And then the stockpile of digital data that these empires hold is obvious.
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I mean, Facebook not only owns the largest pool of personal data in the world, but it also has access to a social graph
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that shows it how all of its two billion monthly active users are connected to each other.
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Every time any of us consents to Facebook's data terms and conditions, we we give them permission to control our profile.
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It becomes their property.
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Every time, and the same data is either sold off in bulk to companies who are happy to pay for it,
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or used to undercut rivals and strengthen the hold of these rising empires.
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And this brings me to my second point, which is that these companies partake in anti-competitive behavior.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Google has an 88% market share in online searches and search advertising,
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while its Android mobile operating system enjoys an 80% global market share within its category.
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In some sense, not since the era of Rockefeller Standard Oil has a company dominated a market to the extent
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that Google does.
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And that's not all.
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Facebook has a 77% market share in mobile social media, and Amazon controls 74% of e-book sales, and will soon become the biggest clothing retailer in the United States.
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This has created what The Economist calls the winner-takes-all economy of the technology age.
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compared to any other industry in the world.
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Well, I'll get to that in the rest of my speech.
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And that's the next point.
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So both Google and Facebook, for example, use their dominance in the market to squeeze monopoly ransoms from advertisers, which are always usually higher than market price.
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Similarly, following Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, it has become both a retailer and a marketplace.
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This highlights how a firm as big as Amazon can overshadow brick-and-mortar retail competition through extremely competitive prices,
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only to then acquire the physical presence of its rivals as soon as the competitor's business becomes unwiable.
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In similar vein, all these tech employers have used insights from the data they have amassed to uncover emerging rivals
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and buy them off.
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For example, Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016.
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And when Snapchat rejected Facebook's offer in 2013, well, the rest is history.
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I'm sure each one of us here knows about Instagram's story feature, which had cloned off Snapchat, leading the latter's share prices to drop significantly.
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Point of information.
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I think you're right in saying that there's an absence of external competition in the markets, but a lot of the competition often occurs in terms of especially
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because of the career risk institutes of the certain developers that individuals often get by, by showing up a bit of crotch against their fellow colleagues and public departments with a very same competition.
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So would you say market does apply to an entire competition and an entire value of metrics with these companies?
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We'll talk about that.
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Cool.
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Ladies and gentlemen, in Silicon Valley today, in the home of the entrepreneur,
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the number of startups is lower than it has been at any point since the 1970s.
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And for most of the entrepreneurs that do exist, the zenith of their success is to one day be bought off by one of these giants.
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I can imagine that our honorable opposition would like you to believe that these first are good for the consumers.
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Let's say that many online services would be worse off if their providers were smaller, and in total, the prices of goods has come down.
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But the issue is that this raises question of fair competition, because these firms often benefit from legal exemptions.
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Unlike mainstream publishers, Facebook and Google are hardly accountable for what users say on them.
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It is no surprise then that Trump, for example, was able to and still is able to get his message across on Facebook
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and Twitter in a way
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that is enormously influential without undertaking the kind of obvious quality checks that we would associate with reaching the mass public.
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And it's not like these tech empires just compete in the market.
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From all the statistics that we have seen, they are the market.
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And this brings me to my final point of the night.
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There's no doubt that technology and the web has become crucial to all of our lives and also to the global economy.
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And yet, the decisions on how these technology companies do what they do have never been voted upon by anyone.
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Those judgments were made by executives at Facebook, at Google and at Amazon, and imposed upon a society without any regulatory scrutiny.
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Today, instead of solving the world's problems, as I'm sure our honorable opposition would claim they do, these tech empires have ended up fashioning greater complications.
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Let's take the example of the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S presidential elections.
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Facebook disclosed late last year that it had discovered $100,000 worth of ads
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by several hundred inauthentic accounts that appeared to be affiliated with Russia during the campaign.
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But today, under increasing pressure, these tech firms are intensifying their public relations offensive in order to safeguard their reputation
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and by extension the pockets of their shareholders.
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However, for all the empty talk that Silicon Valley has partaken in, its fundamental attention has always been on whatever it could monetize.
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For example, when Pulitzer Prize winning online news source ProPublica attempted last September to buy targeted ads for Jew haters on Facebook,
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the tech giant did not self-reflect on whether this was an immoral idea.
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It approved the ads within 15 minutes and asked the purchasers on how they would like to pay.
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To conclude, in this day and age, Facebook defines how our society converses, Amazon decides what we purchase,
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and Google regulates how we obtain information.
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These are the companies
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that have the power to allocate the verdict on who gets a digital bullhorn and who is silenced from the interweb.
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Nothing posits their power and the obscure rationales behind their community guidelines more than the fact
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that these firms suspend accounts and handles for posting topless photos
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and yet deem it unproblematic when the Twitter-in-chief of the free world threatens nuclear war in less than 280 characters.
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Ladies and gentlemen, tonight when you're walking out of that historic door, you'll be making a choice.
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A choice about what kind of a society you want to live in.
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One, where a few tech empires rule the many for their own profit, where technologists come for your money and against your democracy just as they have come for your personal data,
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or a society based on healthy competition and free and fair dissemination of information.
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It is for this reason, ladies and gentlemen, that I urge you to vote for the proposition and walk out of the door on the right.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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