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Comment by dgllghr | Hacker News Reader

"There are no nations. There are no peoples... There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars... It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And [France] has meddled with the primal forces of nature, and [France] will atone!"

This is the dystopia we have built. We have allowed corporations to have to much leverage and control.

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I think the extent of that leverage is not well understood.

It's like AMI trying to blackmail Jeff Bezos, but having all of their sites hosted with AWS ....

What happens when it makes business sense for Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook to start charging nation states a license fee for offering their services into their country and all the government services rely on their cloud offerings?

Presumably that nation state puts someone in jail.

On what grounds? They would just be changing their business model

On the grounds of national security?

maybe, but when it comes to calling bluffs it would be much harder for the government to sustain continued denial of services than for Google et al to keep the case in court

The ultimate tool of the government isn’t a courtroom, it’s a kalishnakov.

You see, Google exists because there are governments willing to acknowledge that they have a right to exist.

It's the Zeroth law of the Economy. There's economic activity when you aren't getting shot at. If Google starts making sufficient waves that enough diplomatic pressure can be put on their host country to start tightening the thumbscrews, Google will be faced with a situation where suddenly a lot of it's worth and value start to disappear. If they start having to hire lawyers left and right due to scrutiny by the government or other governments, it becomes a less attractive asset to the market, and opens room for intrepid disruptors to replace their services.

Google has 'won' by being willing to play ball. Once hard ball starts being played, make no mistake. Google will get tipped.

...and if it doesn't, God save us all from the paths that leads to. I'm pretty sure they won't be pretty.

In practice, I'm sure we won't need anything remotely resembling disorder. Google is a monopoly on the search market, but not a holder of a unique resource. One can have pretty good services, be that from Bing/DuckDuckGo (watch how fast they'll upgrade their indexes) or Yandex and other international players. Other than search, Google is even less relevant.

Not being a holder of a unique resource is a good point.

Google do have the mind share though, can you imagine trying to explain to Aunty Robyn that you have to type duckduckgo.com into the search bar now? and that she cant google it anymore?

The government certainly can. For examine, work with the major national ISPs to change the DNS entrees for google.com to a page listing the alternatives. Or just a state-themed version of DDG or Bing

> On what grounds?

Because you thumb your nose at nation-states at your peril.

I like this phrase a lot :)

Presumably the government would pay the fee... and immediately begin building their own competing services...

Governments could have unlimited time and money and still never be able to compete with free market corporations.

A counter-example: https://www.gov.uk/ works pretty well. *

In fact, it's less user-hostile than most commercial sites.

Why is that?

* Disclaimer - I'm British

I'm not British, but that site does seem pretty nice. I don't know anything about the history of it, but I highly doubt it was developed in house.

I don't think it's the case that the government is simply unable to do something like this, I just think they don't provide the right incentives like competitive pay and bonuses.

In the private sector, say in finance, if you're good and you work for the firm for awhile you could get promoted to managing director and make anywhere from a million to ten million in bonuses for the year. If you're a productive manager in government, you don't really get paid much more than anyone else.

The main benefit that government provides its employees is good benefits (healthcare, pensions) and job stability. It's unlikely that you will ever get fired unless for some very gross misconduct.

I think this incentive system attracts the wrong kind of people into government: those who just want a stable paycheck instead of those driven to produce value.

If we just raised government salaries or if the government gave out significant performance bonuses, the government would work a lot better and be much more efficient.

It is in-house, GDS is part of the cabinet office, a govt department - https://gds.blog.gov.uk/about/

I do get your underlying point, but gov.uk has been near-universally lauded as “doing it right” - I think it’s important to take it as an example of “this is actually possible”, rather than brushing it off.

>but gov.uk has been near-universally lauded as “doing it right”

It would be rather disingenuous to heap any level of universal praise upon gov.uk projects, especially considering the high profile foobars reported on a regular basis. This is just one fresh example: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/08/ir35_tax_check_test...

Despite having a common UI/UX for the front-end, most of the development is conducted by different suppliers e.g. Capita, Cap Gemini, Fujitsu et al.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/strategic-supplie...

See, at least companies can't send you to jail, or start a war. Isn't it nice that we have an equivalent counterbalance to governments (with their known history of absolutely irresponsible and destructive behavior, which became even more so in the age of mass democracy, because the governments are now at least indirectly driven by idiots)?

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