How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath.
I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
The fact is, no company actually primarily exists to employ people, and people lose their jobs to this basic fact all the time, sometimes for no reason other than that some investor expects extremely marginal gains from signaling that they are serious about cutting costs
Also, the dissolution of a company and dispersal of its assets could include allocations for severance pay to cushion the blow if that's a concern, which is not always available to people who are hit by random layoffs
Currently the worst thing companies ever face is a little itty bitty fine and maybe a toothless regulator telling them “Pretty please would you mind not doing that again? If it’s not too inconvenient to shareholders that is…”
If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad.
Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component.
You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.
So if I want to start a small business, say a mom and pop restaurant, the public has to approve it first? You must be joking. Most businesses are small businesses. Hamstringing them is a recipe for disaster. Our regulatory system already disadvantages small businesses in countless ways. Indeed, that's part of the reason why large businesses can get away with so much.
The public already has a way to disapprove a business: don't buy from it. If nobody buys what the business is selling, it goes out of business.
The real oversight the public should be exercising, but isn't, is to vote out of office politicians that allow large businesses to buy their way out of trouble.
This “let the market decide” approach is clearly not working. It assumes that only the direct customers of a business are the stakeholders that matter, because they have the wallets to vote with. There are many, many companies that the general public do not buy things from yet suffer their harms. There are a lot of terrible businesses, large and small, that I don’t purchase from which I’d vote in a heartbeat to get rid of if I had the opportunity.
Examples, please? I find this claim extremely dubious.
> There are a lot of terrible businesses, large and small, that I don’t purchase from which I’d vote in a heartbeat to get rid of if I had the opportunity.
Of course, because you personally don't depend on those business for anything. (At least you appear to be assuming you don't--though you might indirectly. But let's assume you don't even indirectly.) What about the people who do?
> Examples, please? I find this claim extremely dubious.
Any company purchasing my data without my knowledge and selling it to advertisers.
Also, do you buy anything that the advertisers who buy your data are selling?