2002165438+February, an entertainment news hot search, some netizens broke the news that Zhai Tianlin, a doctor of Beijing Film Academy and a postdoctoral fellow in Peking University, was being interviewed, and some netizens asked if his doctoral thesis could be found on HowNet. High flyers, a famous entertainer, even asked twice what HowNet was. However, it was hotly debated by the students at school, and many people questioned the authenticity and gold content of his academic qualifications. Some netizens even ridiculed: "Students don't know how to use HowNet, and it's useless to take a doctor's exam." Although it is a joke, it can be seen from here that the Internet is only in the position of schools and the whole academic circle.

HowNet was pushed to the hot search here on April 18 this year. The reason is not the authority of his academic circle, but an information disclosure by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Because of the annual renewal fee of nearly 10 million CNKI, the top domestic scientific research is overwhelmed. It is planned to stop using the database of CNKI in April and have to find another home. Everyone has a question: HowNet, as the top professional knowledge sharing and retrieval platform in China, why does it bully customers so much? Is there a problem of abusing market dominance because of its monopoly position?

Let me explain my personal point of view first. The appearance of this phenomenon itself is unreasonable. It is a sign of lack of supervision. There should be an objective pricing mechanism for the sharing and downloading of knowledge-based content, which cannot be decided by the relative monopolist for the following reasons:

1. HowNet is a knowledge infrastructure and public welfare platform with its unique social functions.

Let's review the history of HowNet. HowNet is the concept of national knowledge infrastructure, which was put forward by the World Bank in 1998 to popularize the basic knowledge of all countries in the world. In response to this call, Tsinghua University launched its website 1999 in June by its subsidiary Tsinghua Tongfang. Its purpose is also an information construction project aimed at realizing the dissemination, enjoyment and value-added utilization of knowledge resources in the whole society. We can start with the initial intention of establishing this website. It should be an academic and knowledge popularization platform that is not for profit and has a certain social welfare nature. Otherwise, it would not have been built by a state-owned enterprise with a school as its background. With the development of the website itself for decades, it gradually deviated from this direction and became a profit-making enterprise. The most obvious example is the duplicate checking service launched by HowNet. The high cost of several hundred yuan makes a large number of graduates miserable. And I make hundreds of millions of dollars a year with this.

Second, many contents collected by HowNet lack copyright, but they are illegally charged.

202165438+February, Zhao Dexin, a retired professor from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, took China HowNet to court. The reason is that HowNet collected more than 100 papers without authorization, and he didn't get a penny of the manuscript fee, so he had to pay when downloading from HowNet. In the end, Professor Zhao finally won the case and was awarded more than 700,000 yuan. This situation is not uncommon. In February of the same year, Chen Yingsong, a writer, also said that he would sue China HowNet because the other party illegally included more than 300 articles without its authorization. Imagine a website that can't even legally protect its basic copyright, and many of its own businesses are involved in breaking the law. Is it reasonable and legal to accept money from others? If it is illegal, why support its behavior?

Third, it's time for our competent department to make a move.

With the development of science and technology, the enjoyment of knowledge is very important, and the cost of knowledge sharing is also decreasing. However, relying on its monopoly position in the academic field, knowledge keeps raising the charging price. This has discouraged top academic research institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which undoubtedly hindered our scientific progress. There have been endless complaints about the monopoly of HowNet. 20265438+ 10 65438+February, the Anti-Monopoly Bureau of the General Administration of Market Supervision said in response to comments from netizens: "It is necessary for anti-monopoly law enforcement agencies to study and analyze specific evidence and make judgments through corresponding procedures, and the General Administration of Market Supervision will conduct verification research.

It has been five months since the last reply from the State Anti-Monopoly Bureau, and all sectors of society are waiting for a clear reply from relevant departments. We can't let HowNet run wild on the road of monopoly. Compared with the improvement of China's education, culture and academic level, HowNet's income is only meager, and we must not condone this kind of excessive forgetting behavior!