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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

I trust (with regards to privacy, censorship and bias) governments even less than Google to be honest.

Any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

That is insane. No corporation has the ability to incarcerate you or kill you. No corporation can round up your family.

What, precisely, is the “threat” that Google presents that does not rely on a government to be the muscle. Are they going to cancel your Gmail account? Cut you off from YouTube?

Surely if they actually are as powerful and dangerous as you think they are you wouldn’t use their stuff at all. But then I guess they wouldn’t be all that powerful if you could just stop using them…

(Shrug) Insane, whatever. All I know is, when I call the IRS, I can get a human on the phone who actively wants to help.

Try that with Google, PayPal, Amazon, Apple, or any number of other companies when an error they've made but refuse to even explain, much less fix, threatens to wreck your livelihood.

To redress grievances with my government, I don't need to make the front page of HN or go viral on Twitter. We don't go a week around here without another front-page lamentation to appeal for noblesse oblige from one of these intentionally-faceless megacorps. That's not how you should have to deal with a company you're doing business with... but it is how you deal with a dictator who leaves you no other choice.

"megacorps have bad customer support" is a wildly different assertion than "megacorps are indistinguishable from government"

Ask the next person who comes on here begging for someone to unlock their account or restore their data so that they can make payroll.

There is a really simple flow chart to figure this out:

"Does entity X have a monopoly on violence?" If yes, they are a government. If no, they are not.

Whether X is nice or mean, important or unimportant, is irrelevant.

That's simple in countries without a Second Amendment, or that don't recognize self-defense as a fundamental human right, but it's not simple in this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

It is deeper that that, corporations literally are governments. When you form a corporation you are creating the government that your organization will now operate under. usually this will require a license from whatever larger governmental structure you find yourself in.

Sometimes this is a publicly tradable for profit endeavor, sometimes it is private or perhaps non-profit(all profits have to be distributed back into the corporation), or even an actual public corporation(often called a town or a city,

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