Snowden: "Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren't fighting for our interests the same way".
Indeed, they must. Your move Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple.
Indeed, they must. Your move Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple.
In the end the base unit of society is still the human, no matter how many layers we place around them.
A CEO/Chairman hurting a public companies profit via protest against NSA would result in shareholder lawsuits. Another good example of the the legal constructs around corporatism and public stock markets hurting the inherent protectionism from abuse free markets offer society.
Corporatism often prevents large companies from acting morally, whether by being protected from real repercussions for acting maliciously via being a single legal entity (resulting in mass settlements not individual employee liability) or their legal obligations to only care about short-term profits (post-IPO), not long term gains or societal benefit.
Google already bowed out of one major market due to ethical disagreements, asking them to do that again with their home market is unrealistic - lobbying to mend the laws is the more sensible approach and one that scales better to businesses of that size.
Besides despite disagreements with US policy it's still not China.
now there's a campaign slogan for 2016.
Why not?
And nobody says they have to immediately shut down.
Lobbying scales better than shutting down or suspending service.
Well, before a few weeks ago, I couldn't really expect my government to spy on all its citizens, use secret courts to bully companies into giving them access to my data, share it with law enforcement for "parallel construction" (intelligence laundering) purposes, and lie to congress about what they were doing.
If you had told me a few decades ago that this would be the situation in the United States at the start of the 21st century, I would have laughed in your face and called you a crackpot, a lunatic, a conspiracy theorist. Absent something like losing World War III, there was no way the United States could become a totalitarian state in my lifetime.
Yet here we are.