Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I still haven't seen the harm to the consumers.

IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world.

That's not necessarily a problem on its own.

It becomes a problem when those same institutions have a very small number of people with specially concocted classes of shares that give people like Zuckerberg majority control of the company despite owning < 30% of actual shares.

I don't want to live in a world where 1 person can have such immense and unchecked power. Especially when that 1 person is immune from, for example, being removed as CEO.

I'm not sure if it's still the case today, but I believe Sergy / Larry had 51%+ control of the company despite only owning ~10% of shares.

> IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world.

Which is why the US government has been collecting all the data they can from google. It's a perfect means to perform mass surveillance on everyone and google has no power to refuse to hand that data over or even to tell anyone about it.

if we allow that this combination of market power (search + ads + channels of distribution like youtube, android) wld lead to mass surveillance, what prevents other companies from arising and abusing this power? Other countries would hv to go along. I don't think trading Google dominance outside the US for Baidu solves anything.

I guess if google went full evil they'd have enough blackmail material to take down just about anybody at this point including politicians. The backlash if they were caught would be huge, but honestly what would we do about it? Switch to Bing who is just hoping to get enough data on us to do the same (and leveraging data collected from our own PCs to do it)?

They only way I can think of to solve this would be to limit the amount of data that companies are allowed to collect, but can we expect the government to vote for that until google does start to abuse what they have on us? Right now they can take that data and benefit from it as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com