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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Like any good futurist or cyberpunk novel, the lines between "government," "corporation," and "individual" are blurring.

Imagine how much power Comcast would have if it silently went rogue and threatened to expose the pornographic habits of a few key senators? Or if shell, Chevron, and BP formed a cabal and declared an oil embargo on the USA, refusing to dock their tankers until they were given tax breaks or until the USA put tariffs on competition.

Right now China is reminding the world that governments still are the sovereign powers. I wonder when the scales will tip?

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The executives that made those decisions would be found, arrested, and imprisoned, if they were lucky. You can only jerk the little guy around like that. Knowledge is not power, power is power.

> The executives that made those decisions would be found, arrested, and imprisoned, if they were lucky

To give mechanism to this method, in America power is competitively shared. Those the ISP is blackmailing will stay quiet. But there are others intensely motivated to uncover the crime, both inside the blackmailed politicians' orbits (to preserve their careers post-downfall) and outside it (to boost their careers by taking out a competitor, to themselves or their boss).

Knowledge is power-lite; when properly wielded, you can convert it into reservoirs of actual power.

The world has always had blurred lines between government corporation and individual.

There are too many examples to name but the big ones are the Dutch East India Company, Nationalized Railroads in the US in WWI and more recently the "Bailout" of banks in the wake of the real estate collapse.

What we've yet to see in history is a corporation that directly and openly challenges a state for sovereignty. I've written in the past that it would be technically possible for a large corporation to raise an army/navy,buy land and declare sovereignty, but that none deign to do it.

The Catholic church is basically a corporation, where the cardinals (the board) elect a non-hereditary emperor (the CEO). Theories of the firm have modeled ideas about corporate governance on the success of this structure. In the past this catholic firm raised armies, held large areas of Italy as the papal states and still today are considered to be a sovereign entity.

> What we've yet to see in history is a corporation that directly and openly challenges a state for sovereignty.

I think you're correct, but the East India Company came pretty close, didn't they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India

As I mentioned in my statement, they certainly come the closest but still far from it, given that they were chartered by the King and then their charter revoked as soon as they grew too large with their land holdings (India) effectively confiscated.

They also didn't challenge Indian state directly, but rather as vassels of the British Empire.

What I'm talking about is for example if Amazon raised a Military, set up a border around Seattle, declared the Port their own and then told the US Govt "we're a sovereign nation" and forced the US into a treaty.

Don't think an army assembled in this manner could withstand the US military, at least not yet

Unquestionably not.

I can think of one example of a corporation overthrowing a state, albeit with its parent government's assistance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

Still falls into the same category of being given a state granted monopoly.

At the point that a corporation has an independent military then we might see something interesting. I'd argue they would get obliterated fairly quickly but it would be an interesting effort.

Why make it overt if you can just buy the government?

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