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Comment by wormer | Hacker News Reader

It's literally capitalism. It's the system that Google was allowed to thrive in and become this powerful.

Power concentration is inevitable regardless of the system because in order to enforce decentralization you would need to, well, concentrate power.

Our best bet is to shame those using products of unethical companies.

Google isn't a government entity, it's a private company. Had there been more restrictions on what tech corporations (and corporations as a whole) could do, power could have been limited by the concentrated power of government. The issue here is that Google can dictate how we live our lives so heavily without any of its users having a say on how Google and its services should be run. The promotion of Laissez-faire capitalism here in the US promoted Google's growth into it's current position.

So what would you like The government to “prevent” Google from doing in this case?

One option is that companies with sufficiently widespread services can't close your account or block you without due process. And restrict the ability of a ban to spread between services of such a company.

Anti-trust laws, regulation on how to handle criminal activity on their platform (transfer detected pornography cases to law enforcement and allow them to decide what to do with the person and its related accounts. Google should not be handling something like this), and other privacy laws? I don't get why you tried to make this gotcha, this isn't a stretch by any imagination - the auto industry is incredibly regulated in the US and that's working well. Or just look at the privacy laws in the EU.

I’m looking at the 99 section 11 chapter privacy laws. How has that affected Google, Facebook etc?

We know what effect affective privacy policies have - the ten line policy change on Apple App Store has caused all of the ad supported platforms to announce falling revenue. The GDPR has only caused cookie pop ups.

So we should shame all the users of Google products, in this case? I'm not sure that shame really works like that and especially when (I assume) there are billions of people using the same products. There's a somewhat lower number of entities controlling the company -- maybe a more effective target.

Plot twist: (maybe) Xyz is (not) an (un)ethical company, so we should establish some sort of authority on ethics with a malleable but firm framework to guide the consistent -- and proportional to the unethics in question -- application of shame to the people using the products.

Shame concentration.

Anti-trust laws are enforced by the state, which is a legitimate concentration of power.

Unfortunately the state has dropped the ball about anti-trust, thanks to stupid economic theories from the Chicago School of Dumbfuckery. Those are the main culprits for the shit we're in.

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