The power and ambition of the giants of the digital economy is astonishing—Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn, but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn’t have any physical product at all. What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed web of its users’ friendships and social lives.

Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be. What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May’s enemies are currently plotting? It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the 460 shops it owns, but the records of which customers have purchased what.

Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. Competition law as presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don’t pay for them. The users of their services are not their customers. That would be the people who buy advertising from them—and Facebook and Google, the two virtual giants, dominate digital advertising to the disadvantage of all other media and entertainment companies.

The product they’re selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids for the honeydew they produce when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives yield. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn’t feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.

1.According to Paragraph 1, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for its _________.

A digital products

B user information

C physical assets

D quality service

解析：选B。B 细节理解题。根据Facebook acquired和WhatsApp定位到第一段最后一句，可知WhatsApp提供给Facebook的是用户的朋友圈和社交圈，故选B。

2.Linking phone numbers to Facebook identities may _________.

A worsen political disputes

B mess up customer records

C pose a risk to Facebook users

D mislead the European commission

解析：选C。C 细节理解题。根据Linking phone numbers定位第二段，可知Facebook违背承诺，将电话号码与Facebook的身份联系起来，即使不知道信息里的具体内容，但知道是谁发送的和发送给谁的，也可能会造成风险。故选C。

3.According to the author, competition law _________.

A should sever the new market powers

B may worsen the economic imbalance

C should not provide just one legal solution

D cannot keep pace with the changing market

解析：选D。D 细节理解题。根据competition law定位到第三段，可知竞争法是clumsy（笨拙的），与数字经济的变化速度相比，它非常缓慢。D符合原文，故选D。

4.Competition law as presently interpreted can hardly protect Facebook users because _________.

A they are not defined as customers

B they are not financially reliable

C the services are generally digital

D the services are paid for by advertisers

解析：选A。A 推理判断题。根据Competition law定位到第三段，根据后半部分可知目前的竞争法保护的是消费者的财务，而当Facebook用户不为服务买单时，他们就不属于消费者，所以就很难受到保护。A符合原文，故选A。

5.The ants analogy is used to illustrate _________.

A a win-win business model between digital giants

B a typical competition pattern among digital giants

C the benefits provided for digital giants ’customers

D the relationship between digital giants and their users

解析：选D。D 目的意图题。根据ants定位到最后一段，可知我们是为了数字巨头的利益，将生活转化为数据，最后还提到这感觉不像民主的关系，即便双方都受益。可见作者举例的目的是为了说明数字巨头和用户的关系，故选D。