Practise Listening 29 - Facebook - Thấm Tâm Vy

Nội dung text: Practise Listening 29 - Facebook - Thấm Tâm Vy

1. is limbering up for a new contest—to reinvent social networking, this time Facebook around messaging. “The future is private,” he declared grandiosely. Though he MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WECHAT MOMENT might not admit it in public, he seems keen to turn Facebook into a Western version of WeChat, the Chinese messaging app whose array of mobile services, MENLO PARKAND SAN JOSE from payments to filing court paperwork, has made it ubiquitous in China— The social network’s boss has a plan to overpower his opponents even if his recent pledge to store user information only in countries that respect the rule of law is an implicit admission that he has given up on the Chinese market, where Communist minders insist that Western firms must keep all data locally. Older. And wiser? Facebook’s core business is maturing, as its boss clearly sees. Its operating margins—42%, excluding $3 billion set aside to cover an expected fine by America’s Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations—remain the envy of the tech world (see charts on next page). In the latest quarter revenue grew by 26% compared with the previous year, exceeding $15 billion. But user growth is slowing. In some rich countries, especially European ones, it is flat. The young prefer social media which are more “intimate” and “ephemeral”, like Snapchat, which pioneered “stories”, messages and pictures that disappear after 24 hours— and which Facebook aped. More than 500m users of Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp now post stories every day. Mr Zuckerberg expects migration from the online “town square” to a digital “living room” to continue; stories may soon In his spare time Mark Zuckerberg like to run. In 2016 Facebook’s boss outnumber posts on Facebook’s newsfeed. The plan is to build it around pledged to cover 365 miles (587km) that year and, ever the overachiever, WhatsApp, which already offers secure texting. It would let users find each completed the challenge other, pay digital and offline shopkeepers, or purchase a cornucopia of online by July. He does not practise martial arts, but his almost discomfiting poise services—perhaps one day using Facebook’s own currency. In time, the thinking could lead you to mistake him for a master of something like aikido. That would goes, it may become as indispensable to Westerners as WeChat is in China. be appropriate, for in his professional life Mr Zuckerberg is trying to turn his Some elements of the new platform already exist; WhatsApp is testing a opponents’ energy against them. payment service in India. Others, such as new shopping features on Instagram, When in early March he announced that Facebook would follow a “privacy- were launched in San Jose. All this falls short of a fullblown business plan. But focused vision for social networking”, complete with encrypted messages that the contours of Mr Zuckerberg’s vision are taking shape. even the firm cannot peer into, observers interpreted this as a defensive move. The 34-year-old is proceeding more cautiously than in Facebook’s early years, Some discerned a belated response to outrage over privacy abuses on the world’s when he was guided by the now infamous injunction to “move fast and break largest social network. Others saw the plan to knit together its instant-messaging things”—but no less deliberately. services, chiefly Messenger and WhatsApp, as a way to make the company That is just as well, for “platform shifts” are tricky. Microsoft did not see harder to break up, as some American politicians demand. Others still spied a smartphones coming and Facebook itself almost missed the rise of mobile apps. ruse to escape liability for violent user content, now that Facebook would no To succeed, it must clear a number of hurdles. The first is technical. Facebook longer be able to read any of it. All three rationales probably played a part. Yet wants an Instagram user to be able to send a note directly to a friend on the firm’s “privacy pivot” is perhaps better seen as an aikido-like redirection of WhatsApp. Creating a common phone book for these services, with a combined detractors’ momentum. Mr Zuckerberg’s speech at his firm’s annual developer total of 2.7 billion users and different source codes, presents a knotty problem conference in San Jose on April 30th suggested as much. Far from retreating, he Thẩm Tâm Vy’s Archives, 2019 PRACTISE LISTENING 29
2. for programmers. Chris Cox, one of Mr Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants, is dominance in public social networking into power over private messaging. This rumoured to have left the company in March because he did not think it could be reminds seasoned competition regulators of Microsoft’s attempts to bundle its done (this week Mr Cox attributed his departure to “artistic differences” with operating system with a web browser in the mid-1990s in a bid to control his boss). cyberspace. With the Internet’s rise, the stakes today are bigger: no country wants one firm to become society’s de facto operating system. Since its services cost nothing, Facebook says, it is not gouging users. It could argue that a single dominant social network is easier to police than lots of smaller ones and has greater financial and technical capacity to keep users safe from harmful content. And it would be a bulwark against WeChat, which might otherwise become a force outside China—bringing the Chinese surveillance state with it. Indeed, Mr Zuckerberg’s Washington Post article looks like a bid to broker a 21st century version of the Kingsbury Commitment of 1913, when AT&T, then America’s telephone monopoly, accepted government oversight and agreed to spin off some of its businesses in exchange for not being nationalised or broken up. The difference is that, unlike AT&T, Facebook’s reach extends beyond America and spans a growing range of industries, from advertising to finance. It must grapple with politicians, regulators and rivals. If enough opponents gang up at once, even the most gifted aikido master may struggle to fend them off.  [The Economist, UK, May 4th, 2019] Notes: - discomfiting poise tư thế gây lúng lúng - rationale: nhân tố căn bản; nguyên lý - detractors’ momentum: lời khich bác của kẻ gièm pha - limbering up for a new contest: khởi động cho cuộc thi mới The second challenge is economic. WeChat could become the platform of - grandiosely: unnecessarily impressive: phô trương choice on smartphones because China had no dominant app stores. Facebook - ubiquitous [>ubiquity]: being present everyrwhere: có mặt khắp nơn, thấy nhan nhản must contend with incumbents such as Apple and Google. Since you can’t sell - ephemeral: lasting a very short time microtargeted adverts against encrypted messages your algorithms cannot see, - cornucopia : kho hàng lớn the new platform will need a fresh way to make money. For all its ubiquity, - gouging: đục khoét - spin off: tách thành công ty con WeChat is no cash cow (Tencent, its owner, makes most of its revenue from - grapple: túm lấy = grab online games). Maintaining Facebook’s fat margins would require new revenue sources, such as charging businesses to contact users or taking a cut of any purchases, as credit-card issuers do. Lastly, there are the entwined issues of privacy and competition. Mr Zuckerberg accepts that a lot of people dismiss Facebook’s sincerity here—his recent article in the Washington Post, imploring governments to regulate social media, notwithstanding. It will continue to collect plenty of data. Integrating these, and the underlying apps, could in turn enable Facebook to convert its Thẩm Tâm Vy’s Archives, 2019 PRACTISE LISTENING 29