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Comment by phyzix5761 | Hacker News Reader

Every company is in it for the profits and benefits of its shareholders. Its idiotic to think that companies have benevolent intent toward their customers. If that wasn't the case they would go out of business.

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Not every company is publicly traded, so they don’t have shares nor shareholders. Also, not every company is a massive behemoth who only cares about profit above all. Plenty of people start companies with the goal of providing something useful and good at fair prices and value their customer relationships.

We should really stop with this cynical view that every company is run by greedy bastards who have active contempt for their customers and using it to excuse the behaviour of the worst offenders.

I don't totally disagree with you, but although I loathe the "public companies are legally required to maximize profits above all else" meme, I do think that it's where to companies tend to end to in the absence of other factors, and those other factors tend to be fairly rare for public companies. That's why I view the solution to a company causing more harm to be regulation; the alternative is just trusting them to do better and self-police, which seems like a poor strategy if you already think that a company is causing harm and not doing anything about it.

Obviously people will disagree with how much harm is enough to be worth regulating, and I'm not trying to make a claim here about whether it's necessary for what we're talking about around search results. My point is that the fact that public companies can theoretically put social good above profits doesn't really change the fact that in practice few do, and the common pattern is worth taking into account.

People bring up Dodge Vs Ford but Ford's crime wasn't refusing to pay shareholders, it was refusing to pay shareholders because the shareholders were raising money to compete with him and he wanted them to have less money so they couldn't do that. Anticompetition law, not shareholder primacy.

> Not every company is publicly traded, so they don’t have shares nor shareholders

They do, they're just not publicly traded. Private companies still have owners and investors.

Every company has at least 1 shareholder. In some categorizations shareholders are called members but its the same function. But, who said companies are run by greedy bastards? Every company tries to make profits so they can continue their business, otherwise they would go bankrupt. If someone starts a venture with the goal of providing a good or service for no profit we have a classification for that. Its called a non profit.

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