New infrastructure, future communities, and smart city construction can be said to be very hot topics today. How to distinguish their definitions and their relationships? New infrastructure: I have talked about the definition many times before, so I won't go into details here, but I want to emphasize that digitalization and informatization must be an important part of the new infrastructure. "New infrastructure" is a new type of infrastructure that serves economic development, and building a smart city itself is the development of the national economy. Therefore, the development of "new infrastructure" is to lay the foundation for the construction of smart cities. Future community: This is a new concept, and there is currently no standard definition. However, we have issued "10 trillion "Big Blue Ocean" before, and China Railway Construction dare to be the first in the future! "As mentioned in the article, in this field, China Railway Construction is the state-of-the-art construction enterprise currently at the forefront. According to the definition of Zhejiang, the main goal of the future community is to further explore the implementation path of urban organic renewal, park city, smart community, and block system under the new smart city structure, and integrate services for the comprehensive transformation of old communities in various places and the community governance system and governance capabilities. modernization.

Smart city: What is a smart city? There is no standard statement, including many academicians and experts in this field have different views on this. Because the construction of a smart city is a complex systematic project, the disciplines involved include computer science, information engineering, geographic information systems, public management, regional economics, urban sociology, etc., which are typical interdisciplinary subjects and so on. But there is one core that everyone agrees on, that is, the core of a smart city is people, and the most important thing is undoubtedly to let the masses feel "wisdom" and "convenience". Although there is no standard definition of a smart city, you can learn from the description of it by national leaders. In March 2020, the state leaders emphasized when operating the command center in Hangzhou City Brain: “From informationization to intelligence to intelligence is the only way to build a smart city, and the prospects are broad.” It can be seen from here that a smart city is The highest point in the future, which covers all aspects and modules such as informatization, new infrastructure, and future communities. It is because of its strategic height + policy dividends that the entire industry chain has attracted competition from powerful enterprises including construction central enterprises and Internet giants.

A hundred schools of thought contend

In recent years, with the implementation of smart cities in China, this field has also rapidly increased. How high is the temperature? As of the end of 2020, more than 700 cities in my country have clearly proposed or are building smart cities, and the market size is expected to reach 30 trillion yuan by 2025. Under the temptation of huge cakes, the development of smart cities is in full swing, especially in the post-epidemic era, which has become a new direction for the development of major markets. If the smart city is compared to a mobile phone, then the smart city brain is the chip. Therefore, the smart city brain has also attracted the competition and monopoly of hundreds of technology companies including Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, Tencent, iFlytek, Zhongke Brain, 360, Didi and JD.com.

Seeing the term "Internet giant monopoly", do you smell a familiar taste? Yes, in fact, such incidents not only occur in the e-commerce industry, but also in the Internet field. In recent years, whether it is taking online car-hailing, online room booking, ticket booking, etc., consumers have been "killed" by big data frequently in the newspapers. Including Ali was fined 18.2 billion recently. It can be said that this is a product of platform monopoly, which has attracted the attention of relevant departments. The "winner takes all" situation in the Internet industry has become more and more obvious, and with it, the voice of antitrust has become more and more intense.

Does it threaten personal privacy

Today, Internet giants are bringing hugely successful platform models in the e-commerce and social fields into the construction of smart cities, providing strong support for opening up data, providing convenient services, and realizing digital twins. However, we will also be worried about whether this Internet platform model will speed up the rapid implementation of domestic smart cities, will the city lose its diversity? Threatening the data privacy of ordinary citizens?

Alibaba's "City Brain" was listed in the first batch of national new-generation artificial intelligence open innovation platform catalogs by the Ministry of Science and Technology. It has a number of unique core technologies in terms of technology, and has also obtained corresponding software copyrights and patents. It is the only city selected A provider of brain management platforms; combined with Alibaba’s “urban brain” successful cases in Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, Haikou and other places, Alibaba has rich experience and leading cases in the “urban brain” field. Therefore, Alibaba is in the “urban brain” field. Participation in the "brain" project is irreplaceable and unique; in terms of business maturity and completeness, the number of consumer users of several Alibaba products and services are in an absolute leading position, including Alipay, Taobao, Tmall, and Hema , Word of Mouth, Are you hungry, rookie, Gothe, Dingding, etc. (Ali has more than 1 billion active users and nearly 800 million annual active consumers in China's retail market). It has an irreplaceable advantage in the first phase of Suzhou's "Urban Brain" project.

From the current point of view, Alibaba Cloud can be said to be the dominant player in smart city brains. Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud and other giant clouds have less shares than him. Many people may ask, except for a few Internet giants, are there no other Internet technology companies? Yes, for example: On January 14, 2021, Digital Ningbo Technology Co., Ltd. won the bid for the first phase of the Ningbo Big Data Center Platform's software, hardware and supporting service projects for 250 million yuan. Seeing this company, do you think that a company other than the Internet giant has finally won the bid? Haha, don't be too naive, because half of the Internet is in the hands of Internet giants. Looking at the screenshot below, you will find that it still has not escaped Ali's palm, because Ali is the largest shareholder of Digital Ningbo Branch. On February 9, 2021, the single-source procurement announcement for Ningbo City Brain's software, hardware, and supporting service projects was released with a budget of 160 million yuan. The supplier is still Digital Ningbo Technology Co., Ltd. The reason is still the single-source procurement, and the reason why Digital Ningbo Technology Co., Ltd. can obtain it with a single-source procurement method is also because it relies on Ali.

Internet giants rely on the platform economy monopoly in the consumer Internet field to obtain high profits, and thus have advantages in traffic, talent, capital, technology, and algorithms. Therefore, today's Internet giants, smart cities, and brain areas can be said to be devastating. , The construction central enterprises cannot compete with them at all. Although each central construction enterprise has its own information technology company, the current business layout is mainly in the aspects of informatization, new infrastructure, and future communities, and in these fields, it is also biased towards the construction of "infrastructure" attributes. Therefore, in the short term, the monopoly of Internet giants in the brain field of smart cities cannot be changed. And just as 3.15 exposed the problem of resumes being sold on the recruitment platform, Liepin, 51job, and Zhilian Recruitment successively apologized in the middle of the night. Therefore, we can see from here that the security of data information has become a top priority. Not only individual users, but data is the core competitiveness of an enterprise and the basis for its survival. Any act that causes data leakage will bring immeasurable losses to it. Therefore, for the government that provides public service products, how to protect the data security of individuals and enterprises should be raised to the highest level. In addition to the monopoly of Internet giants in the construction of smart cities, there is also a very fatal aspect of exclusivity. It is reported that some Internet giants, relying on their monopoly position, will sign an exclusive agreement when signing a contract with a city, and only allow enterprises (subsidiaries, holding companies) of the platform to participate in the construction of smart cities.

Data is the backbone of a smart city. Open city data can make the city management environment more open, transparent and more efficient. Today, a smart city should be an open ecological platform with a hundred flowers blooming on the platform. If companies participate in the process of smart city construction, you do yours, I do mine, and mutually exclusive, which will make the smart city ecology lose its diversity, and it will inevitably lead to new data segmentation and islanding.

Although Internet giants have the advantage of top-level design, we said at the beginning that a smart city is a systematic project, and the entire ecology is by no means a company that can realize it independently. For example, as mentioned above, the current business layout of construction central enterprises involved in the Internet is mainly in the aspects of informatization, new infrastructure, and future communities, while smart cities are the masters of these "informatization, new infrastructure, and future communities". Therefore, to use an appropriate analogy, in the construction of smart cities, the construction of central enterprises is like laying the foundation/building limbs, and the Internet giants are installing the brain. No matter how flexible the mind is, the limbs cannot keep up. It is no use. Therefore, the two sides are complementary. . Therefore, the construction of a smart city requires enterprises and enterprises to keep open and cooperate with each other. Construction central enterprises have the advantages of integration of infrastructure construction (investment, financing, construction, and operation). In addition, each company is now working on informatization and new infrastructure. Therefore, in the near future, with the accumulation of experience/strength in various aspects of construction central enterprises, It will definitely be able to become one of the leaders of the smart city brain and compete with Internet giants! Edit/Xu Ning