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Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

The concerns expressed in the post have nothing to do with conspiracy, and everything to do with power. Democracies are usually built in such a way as to prevent concentration of power -- not to fight a real or imagined conspiracy. Concentration of power in itself is bad enough even without malevolent intent behind it.

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I think the point is that even when individuals accrue large amounts of power, like Page/Brin, Zuckerberg, the Kochs, the Bushes, or the Clintons, that it is never really all that concentrated, because there are still thousands and millions of competing interests to consider.

Power flows from many different places. At least for the past couple of centuries, it is never so concentrated that a single individual can orchestrate the world without repercussions.

Not only that, the article makes it sound like Larry Page set out to conquer the world and decided to start from a search engine. The reality is far from that, there is no master plan to capture the personal information of everyone, just the need to provide useful services and an incredible business acumen on the part of the management that consistently acquire winning teams and companies over the years.

The commenter is arguing the opposite - without concentration of power, you get chaos, which is a bad thing

Which is why democracies have checks and balances, and it is our responsibility to make sure that the power held by private institutions does not grow unchecked. The US made that mistake once, and it took a heroic struggle to wrestle that power away [1].

[1]: http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Libr...

It doesn't say chaos is a bad thing.

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