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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine the response if the uk tried to break up apple

This right here is why they need to be broken up. Are we supposed to have a company more powerful than a country?

It is not just Apple. The UK is going after every company with their porn filtering laws. Imagine the response if people did not stand up to their tyranny and the Uk kept pushing their agendas further and further. This is why the UK needs to be broken up.

That's having the causation reversed. The porn filter laws are them breaking themselves up, because they're a hidebound own-goal and they're causing significant damage to themselves for no advantage.

But censorship laws and antitrust laws are two different things. It's possible for the same country to get one thing wrong while simultaneously getting a different thing right.

I get the argument, but "country" spans many orders of magnitude in size. I mean, deliberately extreme example, but I'm fairly sure the smallest of the discount supermarket chains near me is more powerful than the country of Tuvalu:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_(supermarket)

Also, one party being stronger doesn't mean fighting them is worthwhile, e.g. Iceland threatening to withdraw from NATO to win the Cod Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars

And and, also why the People's Republic of China hasn't taken control of the Republic of China after all this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan

Countries that small are outliers and aren't really the point. It's about the size of the company, not the size of the country. Being too powerful for the smallest country isn't that interesting. Being too powerful for the median country seems like a problem, much less for the UK, which is at the ~90th percentile by population and #6 in the world by GDP.

Yes? In feudalism, kings control everything. In capitalism, investors control everything. It's what the system is named after - kinda hard to miss.

Investors don't control Apple, the CEO of Apple does. The investors are random people holding shares of it in their 401k. The company being so big is also they reason they can't control it effectively, because the people holding it are so diffuse that they have significant coordination costs.

In the same way, one could say that the president, prime minister, or similarly titled person controls a democracy.

Investors are "one share, one vote", rather than democracy "one person, one vote". The recent thing with Musk/Tesla and his trillion dollar options is being voted on, and Apple face campaigns and have votes, too: https://apnews.com/article/apple-dei-shareholder-proposal-an...

> In the same way, one could say that the president, prime minister, or similarly titled person controls a democracy.

That depends how big it is. For something the size of the US, sure, and that's a problem. It's one of the reasons the central government was meant to have limited powers.

For something the size of a small town or local business, absolutely not, because then each vote both matters more to the outcome and has more direct consequences to the voter, which dramatically lowers the coordination costs. A single individual could change the outcome just by convincing a small number of local people who are each more inclined to care about it.

The investors with effective voting rights are not usually people with retirement funds, but rather the administrators of those retirement fund pools.

So another case of it not being the investors then.

You invested in Vanguard, and Vanguard invested in the company and promises to give you the same amount of money they get from the company, but doesn't pass through other rights and responsibilities.

Whether that behaviour is good or bad have nothing to do with the economic system in place. Pure capitalism have obvious flaws. To me, a company being more powerful than a country is one.

Yes, but capitalism is just a name for the bad thing. We don't actually say that we have capitalism, if we did we would basically be saying 'capital ownership by some to the exclusion of others is good actually' and that isn't compatible with having society.

You say things like 'free markets are wonderful and efficient and we don't believe that they lead to the kind of outcomes that people who have come up with terms like "capitalism" believe they will'.

This is feudalism. Technofeudalism, to be precise. Corporations have created digital fiefdoms and reduced us all to serfs.

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