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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

Constant news about Google banning accounts for various mistakes, small or large, reminds me of a certain country's social credit system. When will they start banning people that have any kind of contact with accounts in bad standing? Will they start denying purchases on Google Pay depending on how well behaved the account is?

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Companies are authoritarian dictatorships

Which is why its baffling to me that lots of people who are deadly afraid of government tyranny are completely ok with privately owned tyranny (even monopolistic kinds)

Government tyranny is a far greater danger because government can use force in the form of army and police, and when established it effectively owns everything else in the country.

The privately owned tyranny has much less power, and when it becomes bad, government can intervene.

So while no tyranny is ok, government deserves much more attention, because it is the more powerful tool, that needs to be protected much more vigilantly.

The people who control the people with the guns are the government. In the west, those people are somewhat separate from e.g. private companies, but that's just how we choose to do things, not some intrinsic feature of governments.

Some of these private multinational corporations are easily more powerful than some smaller governments.

Let's just agree that both can grow bad. It's just that clearly, governments+people can grow a LOT bigger (in absolute number of people) than a corporation, before it generally goes bad.

None of the largest corporations are really trustworthy, and neither are the largest countries stellar examples of good governing. The difference, however, is an order of magnitude more people being "managed". Apparently Google (Alphabet) employs about 100,000 people, most of them subjects not rulers. That's just a very small city or large town.

If we compare this to a small-medium sized country with a reasonably well-working economy, the difference becomes laughable: The corporation is a much, much, smaller group of people, with a disproportionally unwieldy huge amount of power, completely unable to control themselves and behave in an ethical manner. It's pathetic. YES they absolutely need a government to regulate them just like a baby needs someone to change their diapers.

> It's just that clearly, governments+people can grow a LOT bigger (in absolute number of people) than a corporation, before it generally goes bad.

I don't think it's so easy to separate the two. A corporation is not a real thing, it's a legal fiction created by a government. If a corporation acts badly, it's really the government that allowed it to act badly.

The complications occur when a corporation obtains enough power to be able to influence the government, and thus the ability to influence the rules by which it abides, like a recursive program which is able to alter the mechanics which created it.

At this point, the difference between government and corporations start to blur. It's entirely possible for a corporation to be initially created by a democracy at the will of the people, but over time, as its size and power grows, is able hold the government captive, and control its own rules.

Sadly, this is not just a hypothetical thought experiment.

Which is ok if they are small, have many concurrents, and their field of activity is old enough to have reasonable laws. Unfortunately for google none of this is true for them. And if they don't want more people demanding to break them up, or proposing unreasonable laws for internet, they should be smart enough to not do stupid things like this.

This is a good model. Companies have two constraints keeping them in line: if they cease making money, they die (in general, at least); and the law can tweak their behavior toward benevolence.

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