And/or are you cynically interpreting this as a piece of PR to rake in the karma? Nearly every act by every person or institution can be interpreted as a cynical attempt to curry favor. Who gets the benefit of a doubt and who gets condemned?
The FAANG are random assortment of companies that share little in common aside from being large. Facebook and Google monetize eyeballs but in very different ways. Amazon is a logistics and retail and PaaS powerhouse. Netflix streams movies. Apple sells hardware and services and, in stark contrast to Facebook and Google, temperamentally despises performance advertising. Google and Apple (and Microsoft and Salesforce and Nintendo and…) have walled garden marketplaces.
Apropos a dubious assertion the grandparent made, Google and Apple are also the driving forces behind the two most feature-filled web browsers that enable ever more sophisticated web apps to run on smartphones outside of their walled gardens at no charge.
So, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions to make a company a FAANG, aside for assisting with the construction of a snappy acronym, and what are the conclusions that flow from those conditions that justify your assuming every one of their acts is best assumed to have been done in bad faith?