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.

答案精析：根据题干中的ants analogy可定位至最后一段第二句。此句说到，蚂蚁养殖称作蚜虫的虫子是为了获得它们在觅食时产生的蜜，而谷歌“养殖”我们是为了得到我们数字生活产生的数据。由此可见，作者进行类比是为了形象地说明数字巨头和用户之间的关系，因此正确答案为D。

错项排除：A和B中都没有提到“用户”这一关键词和文章主旨词，故错误。尽管用户确实能从数字巨头的服务中得到益处（如谷歌帮助用户从收件箱中屏蔽垃圾邮件），但作者最后说道，即使双方互利，但数字巨头与用户之间的关系并不像是人道或民主的，故作者在此处举蚂蚁的例子并不是为了说明用户得到了益处，因此C项也要排除。

长难句解析：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.

本句主干为Google farms us，为主谓宾结构，for the data为目的状语，后面的that our digital lives yield为定语从句，修饰data。前半句Just as引导比较状语从句，其中called aphids为分词作后置定语，修饰bugs；they produce为省略引导词的定语从句，修饰honeydew，后面when they feed为时间状语从句。

句意为：就像蚂蚁从一种叫蚜虫的昆虫身上获取它们进食时产生的蜜汁一样，谷歌从我们身上获取我们的电子生活所产生的数据。