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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Can we take a moment to talk about this club's business model?

There's not even any information to see what the "private forum access" that you have to pay for is about, what kind of people are in it...or even to know about what happens with the money.

For me, this sounds like a scam.

I mean, no information about any company. No imprint. No privacy policy. No non-profit organization. And just a copy/paste wordpress instance.

I mean, srsly. I am building a peer-to-peer network that tries to liberate the power of google, specifically, and I would not even consider joining this club. And I am the best case scenario of the proposed market fit.

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Not being set up as a 527 nonprofit[0] is the biggest red flag - no donation or membership money has to be spent for political purposes. They also use memberful for their membership/payment system, which doesn't require owning a business, so you might be paying out to the owner directly instead of to a business with its own bank account. Maybe the owner is looking at HN and can clarify.

To add, there are a lot of businesses that use the terms 'Knucklehead' so finding their business on secretary of state business searches might be impossible.

0: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/political-organiza...

They want you to pay them to "research" google's web crawling monopoly. It's really just a donation, but they don't frame it like that. Probably more credible than using a crowd funding website, because it sounds like their pushing for actual legislation.

> Meet with legislators and regulators to present our findings as well as the mock legislation and regulations. We can’t expect that we can publish this website or a PDF and then sit back while governments just all start moving ahead on their own. Part of the process is meeting with legislators and regulators and taking the time helping them understand why regulating Google in this way is so important. Showing up and answering legislators’ questions is how we got cited in the Congressional Antitrust report and we intend to keep doing what’s worked so far.

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