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Comment by Rooster61 | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering when the flashpoint will be when a standing government is publicly given the finger by a megacorporation. It's happening quite often these days through wishy-washy sideways explanations and question dodging worthy of the very government members that are doing the questioning, but eventually corporate executives will get to the point that they no longer find that they NEED to do such things, daring the world's presidents and parliaments to do anything to stop them.

At that point, I think society will need to question where they have given power: to the governments through taxes and laws, or to corporations through willful dollars and convenience? After all, what power does a body have if not granted it by the people (at least ideally)?

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At which point the megacorps will discover that governments command actual loyalty and a monopoly on force. Corporations only have such massive power because institutions of government have abdicated their responsibility to control them. Maintaining that status quo requires business to at least pay lip service (and sometimes money) to the supremacy of government.

The point which GP refers to, where corporations find they will no longer need to pay lip service, is precisely the point where governments lose that monopoly of force.

I think we have a lot to learn from how generations of infighting for control of the Roman empire led to the disintegration of civic society that allowed the Christian church to fill the power vacuum. The transition from the Principate, during which Emperors still paid lip service to the Senate, to the Dominate, where the pretense was lifted, was made possible because centuries of factionalism had destroyed the foundations that allowed checks and balances to be enforced.

In addition: consider that “force” also relates to actions online. A government may be able to arrest employees of a company on its soil, but consider the consequences of Google turning off gmail/google access in the UK. Not parity, but that power is real and something governments should be worried about.

I imagine more the reams and reams of data that Google (and the rest of FAANG) has stored on each and every citizen, including those elected to power. They could utterly destroy virtually anyone sitting in office politically with a few keystrokes.

That also goes the other way what does 5 Eyes have on those in FAANG?

> They could utterly destroy virtually anyone sitting in office politically with a few keystrokes.

I don't think this is necessarily true. The Mayor of Toronto admitted to smoking cocaine, and after that regained his former seat on the city council.

The blackmail attempt on Bezos just recently.

Trump is president, despite the mountains of dirt on it.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are still touring.

I don't think the electorate cares if you're caught doing anything adults do, and low level corruption seems to be the norm in many developed democracies.

What could any of the large data-whore companies possibly have on anyone that would utterly destroy?

It would harm google far more than it would harm any government. Google users in other countries would abandon them en mass for alternative services, in case the same thing happened to them. It doesn’t even matter much whose fault it was.

Plenty of other countries besides China tightly control internet access.

Banning Facebook in the UK would cause them a significant amount of grief and likely close their London office (Facebook is the IDP for Facebook employees). Most folks are not going to go through the trouble of setting up VPNs for their phones to connect to Facebook.

I think it would be extremely electorally damaging to ban such a major site, because it would affect so many people, even if people aren't hugely openly fond of Facebook, there would be a huge amount of outrage and anger that the government has cut people off, even if it was for the right reasons.

Banning Facebook in the UK would definitely have an effect at the next polls, where the party in power and the prime minister would definitely be held to account very severely. No semi-democratic country can consider this course of action unless the service is really unpopular.

I find it unlikely that any corporation being banned would have any substantial impact in an election. After all, we’ve elected some really awful people with far worse policies. The UK voted leave. I doubt they’ll vote to defend Facebook, after they blatantly flout UK law. I’d expect that taking a stand would actually win the party in power more votes.

Don’t underestimate populism: if the UK is concerned about Facebook, it isn’t because their citizens aren’t using it! And if their citizens are using it and like using it, then they will be pissed if it’s banned. Now, maybe if the percent of Facebook users is small, there isn’t much need to worrry, but if it’s above 10 or 20%, then that is more than enough to easily turn an election.

China had no problem banning gmail even though it was popular there because no one had to suffer through an election for the decision. The UK doesn’t have that luxury.

> At which point the megacorps will discover that governments command actual loyalty and a monopoly on force.

Agreed, but only with the caveat that that is temporary. I think we are rapidly approaching the point that corporations will be able to sidestep the rug governments currently threaten to pull out from under them. I think that tipping point will be an interesting, if not horrifying inflection point in our history.

Furthermore, much of (at least in the US's case) the "force" you speak of is now rooted in the military-industrial complex. What happens when defense contractors find that it might be more profitable to throw their hat in with a megacorp rather than the government? It's a scary thought.

How, exactly, are we approaching that point? You think militaries and police are becoming less capable? That employees are becoming more loyal to their employers?

Think of it less like the relationship between cops and robbers, and more like the relationship between tax authorities and users of shady offshore tax havens.

No voters or politicians publicly come out in favour of offshore tax havens... and yet somehow, 20 years later they're still there.

Very few tax havens have their own armed forces.

The UK Prime Minister could phone up the head of any British Overseas Territory today and invite them to reform their tax reporting or else a Tomahawk will be fired at their office.

Megacorps will find it hard to resist Gunboat Diplomacy.

> You think militaries and police are becoming less capable?

What guarantees that they will always be on the side of governments?

> That employees are becoming more loyal to their employers?

No, but the common citizen is becoming that way. Right now, are people more likely to call up their representative to try to get something done, or post something to facebook related to their political leanings?

That's not a request to Facebook for help. It's a call to their fellow citizens, with Facebook being a (not very well respected) intermediary. Facebook can interfere with that means of communication, but it can't interfere with military/police chains of command, or physically stop a SWAT team from showing up at Zuckerberg's front door and at Facebook sysadmin's offices.

That might apply to Facebook. But governments are loath to show a force like this which might destabilize markets. It’s not blockbuster action sequences it’s a slow transition of power.

> What guarantees that they will always be on the side of governments?

Most people who join militaries are not career military types and most also care greatly which side they're on. True mercenaries are extremely rare.

How many divisions does The Zuck have?

None, of course. As I said, I don't think we will see anything like this happen with Facebook, but that might not be the case if megacorp monopolies continue to garner political power.

Let loose the automatons. K-mode, engage!

That monopoly on force works great against entities within your country, but it’s a lot less threatening for foreign entities.

Let’s say that Zukerberg tells the UK government to fuck off. There would surely be consequences against Facebook’s UK assets, and maybe employees. But that’s a small part of Facebook overall, and he may decide this is worth it. Direct consequences for him will be limited. He probably couldn’t travel to the UK anymore, but would anyone else extradite him for this sort of thing? Seems unlikely. And it’s not like the UK is going to send in the SAS to kidnap him in another country.

Why does Facebook want to have UK users? Because he gets paid for advertising.

Who advertises on Facebook and targets UK users? Companies in the UK.

Who controls the banking system through which that money flows? The UK banking system.

There are many sanctions the UK can impose short of a full ban. They can issue fines (and collect them), interfere with the Facebook cash flow, in the case of things that are crimes in both the UK and the US can formally request extradition, etc.

I think the HN crowd has been reading a bit too much cyberpunk.

How do you think this has changed since 2008 proved a relatively small number of corps acting together can crash the global economy in a weekend?

Because they were not actually doing anything that directly challenged the authority of governments. If they step out of line to the extent of a direct challenge, governments will just arrest management until they get new managers/owners who behave, as we see constantly in China where the threshold for pissing off the authorities is much lower.

Early on in the Roman Principate, the Senate was able to remove emperors by declaring them enemies of the state, but this only worked so long, as eventually the power of the Senate was undermined. You will notice that there are factions in the US Government who wish to undermine the authority of our government as well. State govermnents are already nearing bankruptcy, so the check on federal government is dismantled. We are currently seeing the balance of the federal government being undermined by identity-driven politics from multiple factions. Next, we are going to see crises driven by politics and climate that will require loosening of ideology in favor of pragmatic solutions, and this will be the groundwork for further dismantling our civic institutions. Piece by piece, the authority of the government will decline until the military will follow whoever can afford to pay them.

We didn’t arrest any executives in 2009, likely out of fear of the signal it would send the markets — so no I don’t believe the Chinese example applies here.

There's not going to be a day where a publicly traded company gives a standing government the finger. Private companies seem like more of a possibility for this outcome, but I don't think any of the super well funded ones are that suicidal.

You'll see well funded PACs for the rest of your life.

The politicians aren't naive. They are inviting some level of campaign funding by threatening these companies. Google clearly has gotten the message. Facebook's spend is increasing significantly.

Google PAC: https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623 FB PAC: https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00502906

> eventually corporate executives will get to the point that they no longer find that they NEED to do such things, daring the world's presidents and parliaments to do anything to stop them.

I doubt it. It's always going to be more profitable to be careful, answering the questions you can, avoiding the questions you can't. Better a faux outraged MP than a legitimately angry and crusading one.

Zuckerberg did not show up to this because frankly if he showed up to every piddly committee overseeing $2B of budget he was requested to attend on, he'd spend all his time doing that and none doing anything else. If they genuinely wanted information, they can ask for it, and his team can provide it (which is indeed what happened). They don't care about information, though. What they want is a whipping boy. It's not "giving someone the middle finger" to refuse to provide them an opportunity to grandstand at your expense. Especially if you have no legal obligation to turn up.

I mean, does anyone honestly think the outcome would have been different if he attended? People yell at him if he shows up and yell at him if he doesn't. If I were him, the calculation would simply be, "Will they yell a lot more if I don't come? Or will anything else bad happen? No? Then I'd rather save myself the time."

Do you mean to say you anticipate Facebook publicly stating that they refuse to comply with the law? I don't think that's liable to last very long in any country where they have a physical presence.

A more likely outcome is that while FB gives a "soft" finger to the government by questioning the law, anti-government disinformation magically accelerates and floods Facebook, causing the formerly loyal citizens to believe that the government is controlled by shadowy Jewish financiers, and that the government's attacks on FB are an attempt to suppress this vital free speech, &c.

Sigh.

I'm old enough to remember when saying something like this earned you a free tinfoil hat and the condemnation of your saner friends.

to be fair, that still sounds insane to me

They don't need to do anything as explicit as that. They can wield their vast power in much subtler ways - promoting competing political content, blackouts, etc.

Control the feed, control the people. Politicians will have to fall in line.

Exactly, which is why I think a literal flipping of the bird to authority is beyond pointless from FB's perspective. They can continue to work contrary to the interests of the state with a wink and a nod.

More to the point, they have a legal entity in the UK:

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06331310

NB Pretty normal for a multinational to have at least one (and sometimes many) legal entities in each country where it has physical operations (offices, employees etc.).

That's a fair point. I emphasized physical presence because governments exert their power within a physical space that they control. If you defy the power of the state within its own territory, you're in for a bad time. But you're right that there's no need for it to come to guns and muscle when their ability to make money depends on their compliance with local laws.

No, I don't see this happening any time soon. But it isn't outside the realm of possibility that something could indeed happen, possibly before the turn of the next century.

Well, to be fair these congressional hearings are mostly nonsense political grandstanding anyway. It's some congressman scoring political points by ranting at Zuckerburg about things they don't really understand and Zuckerburg playing along. If the government were serious, they would start bringing lawsuits against the company or would threaten to craft regulations to reign in the behavior. They are not doing so, so they are obviously not serious. The minute the government starts to do such things, Zuckerburg will also be more serious.

I hope very soon. Then we can end this absurd experiment where multinationals and trade deals are above countries.

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