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Comment by ItendToDisagree | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Wiki didn't promote or get involved with this REALLY hurt the cause...

To many (read: The Majority) of people the above companies are the internet. In the same way the people who think this way used to think AOL was The Internet (Capitals important). It really is sad that this seems to be true and that a couple companies have so much influence on what the internet is and does. But it really did make it easy to downplay the whole thing by saying "If it was so important why didn't Google get involved?"

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So the press has picked up Wikipedia didn't get involved but what actually happened was:

* Jimmy Wales posted on his talk page inviting discussion on the issue [0]

* There was support for having articles on the main page all be related in some way to the topic of mass surveillance [0]

* A handful of editors then made a subpage and began plans for a request for comment (RfC)... [1]

Then said handful of people made a series of bungles and strange decisions (like naming the proposal "Surveillance awareness day" instead of associating with the protest) and ultimately didn't bring the RfC to the community for proper discussion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Surveillance_awarene... (see history, talk page)

TL;DR Wikipedia didn't decide not to get involved in the protest, 2 or 3 editors dawdled and made bad decisions until we ran out of time to discuss it.

One of the problems with emulating a PIPA/SOPA protest was each website risked portraying itself as some sort of political advocacy tool. A lot of Wikipedia editors were supporting the day but some also made the point to remain apolitical(as they also suggested for SOPA/PIPA). Which is a fair point because a political/religious stance would discourage editors and readers alike.

Drupal also had the same discussion and through informal consensus decided to run the banner.[1]

I was one of the developers on TDWFB and still wasn't 100% sold to run political movements on cdnjs.com.

The article in question is pretty misleading. There was significant discussion on Reddit[2] and with the help of the admins there was a pretty positive sentiment floating around too(No statistics but I'm guessing they were a huge source of calls, given all the reports on the thread).

The ending quote unintentionally gives credit to the protest I think . Of course everyone knows on-line petitions are a weak form of protest, which is why TDWFB focused very hard on phone calls and did quite well in that regard.

"“Online petitions,” one Reddit user wrote of the protest. “The very least you can do, without doing nothing.”"

So we drove 88k+ completed phone calls, this number does not include the 6k+ phone calls that we couldn't connect because some senators turned off their voice mail(Reddit comments suggest Feinstein was one of them). This would bring the attempted phone calls to just shy of 95k but the tool is still be used today so we hope to hit 100k attempted phone calls. Plus there were a tonne of untracked calls and we hope to get a full number soon.

Our figure on the homepage for emails is semi-misleading. We are actually delivering those emails to 3 reps per zipcode which brings the email count 183k to 549k.

244k international people signed the petition.

Including the day before and the day after, our traffic to the homepage is sitting somewhere over 1 million visitors.

We gained about 350k fb likes and 60k tweets(of the domain) on the 11th.

And according to Cloudfront and my credit card, we served about 1 billion requests. I don't have the numbers on how many times the banner was displayed just yet.

Edit: As pointed out by ronaldx, the article states that DuckDuckGo did not participate, their logo did change and remains so.

Also major thank you to Twilio for sponsoring the calls.

[1] https://groups.drupal.org/node/398548 [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1xm3qu/today_we_fight_...

Every time I read something about "behind the scenes" at Wikipedia, I'm glad that I never really got involved.

I imagine 'behind the scenes' at most organisations is a nightmare. My experience of the folks at Wikipedia is that they are nice bunch of folks, achieving really amazing stuff with a minuscule budget.

Due to their non-monetary goals, total reliance on volunteers, and transparent structure, they are more like the UN than Google, which inevitably leads to weird arguments.

In 2013, Wikimedia got over $44M in contributions. I'd not call that minuscule. Of course, they have huge site, huge traffic, etc. - but that doesn't make $44M minuscule.

This is what all organizations do when they don't really care about something.

Well, the vast majority of active community members didn't even get to opine on the matter so it's hard to say. Also I'm not sure the encyclopaedia can be called an organisation, and the WMF weren't involved, save JW opening the discussion.

As an aside the people that wrote the open letter (https://thedaywefightback.org/letter-to-wikipedia/) could have instead opened an RfC on-wiki (no account required). It would just take a few minutes to figure out the MediaWiki markup and read the relevant submitting an RfC help page. It's a shame there appears to be such a slender intersection between open internet advocates and Wikipedia editors.

Here's the Village Pump proposal (permalink because VP archives relatively quickly): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village...

We posted it as a proposal in the Village Pump, but it was only after the original proposal failed to hit consensus. I'm actually both an open internet advocate and a regular Wikipedia editor, but I try to be careful (and was perhaps too cautious) about not seeming like I was parachuting in to a discussion underway. Next time, more WP:BOLD.

Wow that I did not know! It does seem they could have just put a banner/image on their front page with little effort though.

So, instead of fighting the government, Wikipedia decided to mimic it.

Optimist in me says maybe if people realize how broken it is on small scale, they'd think how broken it should be federal government scale. Pessimist in me says there's absolutely zero evidence people would actually take any conclusion from it and not just use it as an excuse for not doing anything.

> "If it was so important why didn't Google get involved?"

Maybe because participating also means "telling people that they're constantly being monitored" (and further raising the perceived seriousness of the issue). And maybe the only solution to escape the madness is to simply drop big parts of the currently available technology.

Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/etc are after your money, they only protect your rights if it means "more money", not if it threatens to impact their profit.

So they have no ($$$) incentive to raise the issue. (Our culture is still immature, it favors money over ethical values.)

> Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/etc are after your money, they only protect your rights if it means "more money", not if it threatens to impact their profit.

That's a wild generalization and baseless accusation.

First of all, collaborating with the NSA brings nothing to their bottom line, only infrastructure costs. Second, they are forbidden to be honest about NSA's demands and therefore this has hurt their image in the international market-place.

Maybe most of us were aware that our communications are intercepted, but we had no idea to what extent that happens. As a non-US citizen, I now think twice about collaborating with US-based companies. And it's not because I fear the NSA, I really don't, but rather because I'm thinking that the same backdoors these companies were forced to build can be discovered and used by other organizations that may be closer to home.

And even worse than that - as a non-US citizen I am not represented by any of your officials and suing anybody in the US would be totally unfeasible because of costs. The only thing I can do is to loudly complain about it on the Internet or to my acquaintances and that's about it. If it were my own government doing this shit - at the very least I'd have other options.

Make no mistake - the credibility of all US-based companies suffers and because of this you will see in the following years a lot of (1) proposals for country-wide Intranets, (2) governments switching to their own forks of open-source software and (3) businesses switching to local software providers and so on. You can already see signs of this happening and it's precisely companies like Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo that will take the biggest hit.

And I fear that US citizens and officials aren't taking this seriously - as if us, non-US citizens should have expected this surveillance, without thinking that the US placed itself as the guardian of the Internet, that trust has now been eroded and the effects (e.g. country-wide Intranets, local software achieving monopoly by government intervention, etc) will be negative for everybody.

EDIT: speak of the devil - http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-142_en.htm

> > Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/etc are after your money, they only protect your rights if it means "more money", not if it threatens to impact their profit. > > That's a wild generalization and baseless accusation.

Global surveillence is (part of) these companies' business models. They don't support privacy, they just disagree on who should be allowed to do the snooping.

> They are forbidden to be honest about NSA's demands and therefore this has hurt their image in the international market-place.

The problem is that these demands are possible to fulfil in the first place. Solving that problem would force these companies to find new cash cows.

Surveillance is arguably part of these companies' business models. However we are talking about their own stuff, their own products, their own servers and I expect them to be upfront about it (e.g. hey, we are using your data for ads targeting) and to fix vulnerabilities that may allow third-parties to access my data ilegaly or to harm me.

With NSA we are talking about something different. If the NSA can engage in subverting encryption standards, there's no end to what they can do. If they ask Google to plant a backdoor in the Chrome binary, or Microsoft to plant a backdoor in Windows, or Apple to plant a backdoor in iOS/OS X, thus removing Google/Microsoft/Apple in the connection between me and them - I'll never find out about it and my software will be defective "by design" and as I've said, my personal fear is not the NSA, but rather organizations that are closer to home. For example, if backdoors in the software that I use exist, then they can be discovered by organized crime syndicates that say, are in the business of stealing credit cards, or whatever.

Can Google/Microsoft/Apple/Yahoo promise to do the right thing with such possible exploits? Can they promise to fix them, as they are discovered? Of course not. Hence, I cannot trust them anymore, because it is not in them that I have to trust.

> The problem is that these demands are possible to fulfil in the first place.

Well, shit happens all the time, mail accounts get hacked and so on. To me the real problem is that the software that I use may be defective by design and I cannot trust these providers to fix it or to tell me about it. Voting with my wallet also doesn't work anymore, as long as the alternative is still a US-based company and in this regard I now feel that all US-based companies are equal. Yahoo even tried fighting warrantless spying and failed and we found out about it only because of Snowden's leaks. So even if they want to do the right thing, they can't.

I don't like it when corporations interject themselves into politics. This goes for companies that support my politics as well as companies which oppose them.

Then you should start rebuilding the political system which defines DC. Corporations literally ARE the government, nowadays. (It was given the name "lobbying", but is nothing other than corruption that's apparently accepted by the voter/citizen.)

> Corporations literally ARE the government

Literally? I didn't know that.

It actually seems like this NSA stuff has been harmful to a number of large American internet companies, so I guess they haven't done a very good job of running things in their own interests.

Harmful to a few internet companies, but beneficial to other US companies. The leaks have identified that the NSA conducts industrial espionage to the benefit of US companies.

That said, I disagree with the grandparent's point that Corporation literally are the government. Instead, the need for large media budgets for re-election campaigns drives the political process, which makes corporations and politicians cosy.

What are these "other, larger US companies"? Apple and Google are two of the largest US companies by market cap.

Good point. I was thinking in terms of workforce, influence and global reach, but Goog and Apple have that too. (Made edit to original)

Not in terms of workforce. Google has 47K employees: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=GOOG+Profile

A large percentage of those are overseas, and the remainder are concentrated in Mountain View (yes, I'm aware of satellite offices in SF, NYC, Boston, etc.) Call it 15K HQ employees, which should be enough to make an impact. Right?

Except that their own senator, California's Dianne Feinstein, remains arguably the most vocal NSA surveillance enthusiast on Capitol Hill. She'll get reelected with or without the help of those 15K voters -- in a state with a population of 40 million. (In reality the number is even lower because not all employees are U.S. citizens eligible to vote.)

And those 15K concentrated employees are negligible compared to companies like AT&T, which has 243,000 employees which tend to be inside the U.S. and spread more evenly through congressional districts: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=T+Profile

Of course AT&T has long had a cozy relationship with the NSA very different from left coast companies: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589012-38/

BTW, compare to WalMart's 2.2 million employees: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=WMT+Profile

Evidently, IBM has the second largest workforce amongst US corps.

There are many arguments supporting the fact that some countries [more than others] are close enough to a corporatocracy.

"Literally" is certainly a stretch, but at least indirectly, corporations spanning many sectors are very heavily influencing the government - for example finance, energy, food, military.

Just to make a very immediate example, bankers who had a central role in the 2000s financial crisis, are now executives or advisors of the government.

Process-wise, the HSBC case showed who's in charge between governments and large banks.

Corporations literally ARE the government?

That's why the US has the highest corporate tax rate in the OECD?

Please stop citing that disingenuous, misinformative fact.

The US has the highest statutory tax rates on corporate investment in the OECD. The effective tax rates on corporate income are vastly lower than that, and often actually zero — especially for those large and powerful enough to have sway over the government.

Ummm... no.

The GAO study you're citing is infamously incorrect.

1. Corporations (and humans) can carry losses forward: if they lose money in 2008 but make money in 2009, they get to even out the two years. This is only fair. Thus they can appear to pay zero tax in a year in which they made money.

2. The "effective rate" counts the aforementioned foreign retained profits as being taxed at zero. Which they're not.

3. An independent analysis found that effective corporate tax rates are "in the mid to upper 20's", and that corporations which operate solely in the US pay 35% corporate income tax:

http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/140tn0197.pdf

TL;DR The US really, really, really does have the highest corporate tax rates in the OECD.

Does that even matter when everyone hides their profits in Ireland?

1. Only profit earned outside of US borders may be deferred in such a manner.

2. That profit isn't "hidden". It's in plain sight. It's not even a loophole. The money is still taxable - but only once it is repatriated.

You do realize companies make sure to game it such that they declare no profits in the US, right? And don't even care that much about repatriating it at all? And do so only when there are "tax amnesty holidays" where money can be repatriated "for free" during a short timespan?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

1. All corporations in all nations game the tax system as much as possible.

2. The US corporations still pay more tax than do corporations in other nations.

3. US corporations with no foreign income tend to pay ~35% after deductions (per "independent" study cited above).

So basically what you're telling me is it's very hard to properly compare the final effective tax rates on corporations in two different countries. The study above doesn't compare to other countries. So you don't actually know if it's really worse in the US.

The effective US rates are higher than foreign statutory rates.

So yes, its easy to tell that US corp tax rates are higher.

"Over the last 10 years, General Electric’s Effective Tax Rate Was 2.3 Percent"

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/27/433250/general-e...

I could probably find numerous such examples among the richest companies in the US. So something about your claims doesn't work.

That's just another made up number.

"There are more ways to measure effective tax rates than there are to order coffee at Starbucks"

http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/140tn0197.pdf

Any number that disagrees with your premise is just wrong? Well, your world view is unassailable then isn't it?

So tell me, what do you want? Lower taxes on corporations? They don't seem to be fleeing the US, and are reporting higher profits than ever.

Numbers are wrong if they're wrong.

Read the paper I linked. If you want to argue, argue with the points he makes (and which I've attempted to repeat here). The paper very specifically addresses the sorts of made up numbers which you've cited.

All taxes are distortionary. For maximum efficiency, all income taxes (which by definition punish income and saving) should be replaced with progressive VATs (thus encouraging income and saving). The worst distortionary taxes are the capital gains tax (which solely punishes saving) and the corporate income tax (which has no reason to exist at all - all disbursements are taxed as personal income tax anyways, hence the double taxation complaints).

And yes, some companies do leave the US:

...Bisaro also extolled the added benefit of lowering his company's effective tax rate, which he forecast would drop from 28% to 17%. Based on Bisaro's strongly-held opinions about U.S. corporate tax policy, that must have been a major selling point for the deal. [1]

And hey, guess what I bet you didn't know? It's actually illegal for US companies to leave the country! They have to "merge" with a foreign company to move out.

[1] http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/21/actavis-the...

So what do you want? Lower taxes on corporations? Even while they make record high profits?

And what happens when they hit hard times? Let me guess, lower taxes? So just lower and lower taxes, all the time, no matter what?

Having such tax rate, conversely, is not a sufficient argument to prove the opposite.

Control of the government by corporations is a complex phenomenon, and taxation is only one part of many.

Lobbyists take quite commonly part in the administration, and once they do, they certainly don't start to act against their own interest.

The upside to this is that, by choosing to only support corporations that share one's values, you can still have a positive effect. Voting with your dollar has long been known to be more effective than voting with your ballot.

Corporation is just a name for a lot of people working on common stuff. There's nothing "corporation" can do that is not done by people composing it. And if you don't like people involved in the politics, who else could be involved in it?

The problem is those companies are involved in mass spying, so I suspect they knew which side their toast is buttered.

If you're going to complain about the meaning of words, you should at least try to use them properly yourself.

Lowercase "internet" refers to any network of networks, for example a router which lets machines connected via Ethernet talk to machines connected via WiFi.

Capitalised "Internet" is a proper noun referring to a particular network of networks which began life as the ARPANET.

"Wiki" refers to user-generated Web sites in the style of WikiWikiWeb; since you put it in a list of Web sites/companies, I'll presume you meant "Wikipedia", which is a particular Wiki.

So whilst AOL, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Wikipedia aren't "The Internet", at least your hypothetical "Majority" have enough respect for the Internet to refer to it by name.

That is a really pedantic response that completely misses the point.

You can't deny that there wasn't any real, marketed involvement used by the top Internet companies to promote the cause.

Yes, the execution of this topic's awareness was very lackluster, so what exactly is your point?

Apologies for using a shorthand (Wiki) for something that was clearly referencing the parent post (Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.)... Sorry to ruffle your e-feathers over such a minor thing.

For the record I wasn't 'complaining about words' I was pointing out that the lack of involvement by major players on the internet was a huge detriment to this cause because it failed to reach the 'less advanced' (and arguable majority of) users of the internet.

Classic HN answer

I have to disagree. One of the things I like about HN is that grammar/usage nazi responses seeem to occur at a lower rate than just about anywhere else. Even better - the speed of downmodding is directly proportionate to the quantity of pedanticism present.

+1 I know it because my English are poor.

I don't know, you used "poor" instead of "bad" so you've already got a leg-up on a lot of native speakers.

Oh that's a good thing[1], I guess :-).

[1] http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/have+a+leg+up+on

Why is this comment blacked out? I don't know who it is but, i don't like censorship. Maybe--it something with my browser? I'm kinda a new user. I knew nothing about hell banning until I spent some time here.

Because it has been downvoted to oblivion. HN is a "community" and there are unwritten rules that apply. Being deliberately impolite, attacking another users grammar and not views (especially when the topic is not related to the English language) can have that effect.

Generally speaking, HN promotes constructive criticism and bashes trolling in direct or indirect ways.

The comment was down voted to the point that it is not 'visible' (you can highlight the text to read it). For more info check out:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#downvoted

The FAQ there may be useful for you as a new user in general. :) Enjoy HN

Grammar Nazis are not really that interesting.

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