There's a libertarian minded group, especially here on HN, that seems to have completely forgotten that corporations exist at the whim of the public, using public resources and given public permission.
Now that seems to the other extreme - your bogeyman business has largely been the source of the income for "public resources". They are - imho - a virtuous cycle.
Employees are a resource provided by "the public" (they are the public).
The materials that businesses use are pulled from land whose allocations are supported by the public (through our court systems, our land surveying, our military protections... our general idea of land ownership)
The roads people use to shop at those businesses, or that those businesses use to acquire goods are funded by the public.
The internet that businesses use to sell things online - funded by the public.
The ports/planes that businesses use to import/export goods outside of the community? Funded by the public.
I agree that it can absolutely be a virtuous cycle, though. I support the idea of allowing businesses the freedom to innovate and make choices, and I think we allow those rewards to flow back to those owners to incentivize that (literally - we're talking about capitalism now).
What I utterly, completely reject - is the idea that these businesses are free-standing entities that are not at all beholden to "we the people" simply because they happen to be private. That's lunacy. The relationship must be symbiotic, and when it's not... regulations should be put in place to force them back to that state.
I'm a firm believer that we want to stay in the middle ground between communism and unregulated capitalism. Stray too far either way... and things get ugly and we start killing each other over it.
strawman fallacy Imo.
That's clearly not true.
Would you care to put forth a different claim that you seem to think is being made, that I'm not addressing?
Corporation is Latin for "body of people". They are the public too.
58 percent of Americans own stock. The largest shareholders (like BlackRock) are largely fiduciaries for pension funds, i.e., the working class. I'll grant that corporate governance in the West largely sucks, but the owners of the body of the people are also the people.
>The internet that businesses use to sell things online - funded by the public.
The phones that the public sector employees who built the Internet used to communicate? Funded by the private sector (at least, initially. If we're being realistic both phones and the Internet are the product of a mix of public and private funding). This does not give AT&T the right to run the government. Your others are similar, except moreso for resources like roads that the government provides that could at least theoretically be provided by the private sector.
Not saying your ideology is wrong; I'm saying it can't be supported with "you didn't build that." Sometimes they didn't get there by themselves, but the public definitely didn't generally get there by itself either.
My whole point is that claiming that we cannot regulate a company because they are "private" is an obvious fallacy - and that's exactly what the folks defending these companies claim... "They are private, so we cannot stop them from arbitrarily locking people out". But that's utter bullshit, and I'm growing very weary of the argument we should give companies the power to arbitrarily deny service with no explanation and no recourse. I don't mind the ban, I mind the lack of proper recourse.
> Sometimes they didn't get there by themselves, but the public definitely didn't generally get there by itself either.
It's almost like we're a society, and we must balance the needs of all parties. I'm pretty sure that being arbitrarily locked out of a digital system with no recourse is a potential major harm for folks - and I don't think the justification that "it's part of the EULA" is appropriate. At a minimum, I'd expect to see laws demanding the return of any relevant data (the user's property). But we don't even have that. It's time for regulation...
The individual fiduciary responsibilities of each corporation create a wasteland in aggregate. No one wants to fucking live in this apocalyptic hellscape of advertising, manipulation, deception, and corruption that we have created for ourselves, but no one is willing to give it up either because they have no power to force everyone else to. In order to solve the prisoners dilemma, you do, in fact, need a monopoly on force. You need the entire public, and the will and capability to punish defectors.
The other major option might be that there's no agreement on where the line should be drawn (categorically, objectively). It's easy in a one-off, but codifying can be extremely difficult.
Anything to back up the hearsay?
All user data carries a strong, first-class link to the userID, and all products/infra are required to have systems ensuring that when the user account is deleted, all linked data downstream of that is deleted from storage as well. For most products this is a works-by-default configuration -- the rows in your user table in Spanner have a tag indicating that it's a Gaia ID, and when that ID is deleted in the Gaia system, everything downstream gets automatically deleted.
There's some consideration to what happens in backups as well, but I'm hazy on the details.
> Complete deletion of data from our servers is equally important for users’ peace of mind. This process generally takes around 2 months from the time of deletion. This often includes up to a month-long recovery period in case the data was removed unintentionally.
So 30-day recovery period, then another 30 days for all backups to be scrubbed (I think).
They do not want to set a precedent. Unfortunately, the only option is to have a zero tolerance policy (regardless of outcome) that results in account closure.
From gmail, I can think of 2 things...
* reach out to contacts to say "my new email is ...."
* reset any passwords on accounts tied to gmail (and try to migrate those accounts away)
(yes I'm aware that this would be to a private company, not the govt)