比尔·盖茨：我不赞成分拆科技巨头，否则“坏人”一个变俩（附专访视频）
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北京时间9月17日消息，微软公司联合创始人比尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)对于反垄断调查可以说一点也不陌生。在他看来，一些政客提出的分拆美国科技巨头的建议并不是好主意。
上世纪90年代末，时任微软CEO的盖茨曾经在一桩激烈的反垄断案中与美国司法部对峙了好几年。案件的焦点在于微软将IE浏览器与Windows系统绑定在一起，以维持它在PC操作系统领域的主导地位。最终，微软依旧是一家完整的公司。
20年后，微软成为了少数几家没有受到美国监管审查的科技巨头之一。美国司法部、美国联邦贸易委员会、各州检察长以及一个国会委员会都在审查所谓的“科技巨头”，从谷歌、Facebook到亚马逊。美国政府认为，这些公司的规模变得过于庞大，实力也太强大。美国总统候选人、参议员伊丽莎白·沃伦(Elizabeth Warren)已经制定了一个强有力而又详细的计划，分拆这些科技巨头。
盖茨并不认同这种做法。“你必须好好想想，这是最好的解决方法吗？”他在接受采访时表示，“如果你想让一家公司摒弃一种行为方式，那么你只需说出来，‘好吧，这是一种违禁行为’。但是，将这家公司一分为二，让两个人做坏事，这似乎不是一种解决方案。”
微软此前勉强避免了被分拆的命运。当时，一家联邦上诉法院推翻了下级法院作出的要求微软分拆的裁定。微软市值目前已经实现反弹，超越了苹果公司和亚马逊公司，成为了美国市值最高的公司，这源于市场看好其云业务，一些投资者相信随着美国和欧洲监管部门加大对其他科技巨头的审查力度，微软是一个安全的避风港。
目前，美国众议院的一个反垄断小组委员会正在调查大型互联网公司，要求他们提供有关收购、商业做法、高管通信、此前调查和诉讼相关的详细信息。
“很难让我认同分拆是个解决问题的正确答案，”盖茨称，“这些公司的规模都非常庞大，都是很重要的公司。所以，政府对他们展开调查也不稀奇。”
盖茨表示，微软自身遭遇的反垄断审查使得公司“在这种活动上考虑地更加周全”。在他看来，谷歌、亚马逊等其他公司的行为“完全合法”，“他们做出了许多创新”。
Bill Gates, who knows a thing or two about antitrust investigations, doesn’t think it’s a good idea to break up the biggest U.S. tech companies as some politicians have suggested.
The Microsoft Corp. co-founder and former chief executive officer battled the Justice Department for years in the late 1990s in a bruising antitrust case. At issue was the software giant’s bundling of its Internet Explorer browser to Windows as a way to maintain its dominance in PC operating systems. Ultimately Microsoft remained intact.
Two decades later, Microsoft is one of the few big U.S. technology companies not under regulatory scrutiny in Washington. The Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and a congressional committee are all scrutinizing so-called Big Tech -- companies from Alphabet Inc.‘s Google to Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. -- that Washington has concluded have gotten too big and too powerful. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate, has made a forceful and detailed plan about how she would go about breaking them up.
Gates disagrees. “You have to really think; is that the best thing?” Gates said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “If there’s a way the company’s behaving that you want to get rid of, then, you should just say, ‘Okay, that’s a banned behavior.’ But splitting the company in two, and having two people doing the bad thing-- that doesn’t seem like a solution.”
Microsoft narrowly avoided a breakup when a federal appeals court reversed a lower court ruling ordering the software company to be split. The company has bounced back to top Apple Inc. and Amazon as the stock market’s most valuable company, buoyed by optimism about its cloud business, and on some investors’ belief that Microsoft is a safe haven as U.S. and European regulators sharpen their scrutiny of others in the sector.Lawmakers including David Cicilline, who is leading the House antitrust subcommittee’s inquiry into large internet companies, has asked them for detailed information about acquisitions, business practices, executive communications, previous probes and lawsuits. The panel has also asked for information from customers of those big companies, asking about mobile apps, social media, messaging, cloud computing and more. Virtually every aspect of the companies’ business is under the microscope.
“It’s a pretty narrow set of things that I think breakup is the right answer to,” Gates said. “These companies are very big, very important companies. So the fact the governments are thinking about these things, that’s not a surprise.”
Gates said Microsoft’s own antitrust scrutiny has made the company “more thoughtful about this kind of activity.” In his view, companies like Google and Amazon the rest are “behaving totally legally. They’re doing a lot of innovative things.”
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