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Comment by velox_io | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there's been such powerful organisations since the East India Company.

When Google and Facebook start having personal armies, navies, and courts then I think it will be fair to compare them to the East India company. It's premature to even use them in the same sentence until then though.

"Power" doesn't necessarily imply "military power".

Yes it does, because until these organizations have the power to take things by physical force, it's not even in the same league.

There's a main effect such that the entire world has shifted in the direction of soft-power over the past 60-or-so years.

It's not clear that the East India Trading Company was less powerful than Google, but the issue of military power doesn't disprove the thesis.

What are things? Is money a thing? Can PayPal decide to lock your account and not give you your money back? What about selling your data to other companies? Are those things. You bought media on Google or Amazon and then they close your account because you criticized them on social media. Is that media "things"? See it is a bit more nuanced in today's world than just saying well they didn't knock on your door and took your microwave away, so qualitatively a different situation.

It's trivial to not use PayPal, though. They don't have a monopoly on money. They can't come take all of your possessions and land like the militarized colonial-era private companies could. It's not remotely comparable.

If you want a better modern day example than Silicon Valley tech companies, look at Chiquita. They have had paid paramilitary forces committing murder to protect their interests during this millennium. Until PayPal is literally killing people in order to steal their money and property, you can't say that they are remotely similar.

This is not a defense of PayPal by the way; I dislike them for the same reason you do. But perspective is important.

I don't think any of our current companies are as powerful as East India Company was, or even Standard Oil.

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