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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

Some basic googling would tell you that:

1. the AfD thing was the decision of individual banks, not of the German government. Basically, in a free world companies can decide who they want to do business with.

2. the Canadian trucker "debanking" was quickly resolved because the Canadian justice system did their job and overruled the unlawful "emergency" government order

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After being heard to exclaim "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?", Henry II subsequently explained that the 4 knights each came to their own individual decisions about how best to deploy their swords.

A poor analogy for democratic countries (spot on for Putin and his merry band of oligarchs though).

Being a democracy does not make countries immune from the phenomenon where under their own judgment, private actors decide with information provided to them in part by their own government, it’s more often than not in their best interest to be with them rather than against them.

What if the private company is "deciding under their own judgement because the VP's roomate from College is a chief of staff and they were told it would be really helpful if they decided in a beneficial way? We saw from the Twitter files that Twitter had an active relationship with members of the Democratic party and agents of the government to decide under their own judgement to ban or downrank certain people and ideas. This led to another concrete example of major outlets being effectively banned (The New York Post) due to the Hunter Biden Laptop issue. This behind the scene collusion is where the "they are a private company" line falls apart.

They are private companies. That doesn’t mean it isn’t in their best interest to maintain good relations with the people directing the nation’s sovereign power.

Never forget: sovereign power outranks corporate power. Corporations are better at making money. Sovereigns are better at violence.

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