In reality, corporations hold just as much if not more power over the Internet than governments. Even though a corporation can't physically lock you up, they can (and have, many times) give you a virtual "death penalty" if they don't like you for whatever reason.
This is not OK, and "but private companies can do what they want" really needs to be rethought to reflect reality. We have governments essentially using corporations to get around their own legal restrictions.
Yes, I agree that governments have more physical power over most people and can employ physical violence. I do think that corporations can also employ violence, albeit of an emotional, social, or even financial kind, against their users. If someone has a digital store and for some reason, Amazon or Shopify or Visa or Stripe or Paypal kicks them off their platform, that could ruin their business/livelihood/etc., which in turn could lead to suicide or homicide or drug abuse, etc.
Again, I'm not saying losing one's online business is equivalent to being thrown in prison or many of the things governments can do to people, I'm just confused why people seem to be so afraid of the government getting too big and not also at least a little afraid of corporations getting too big.
And corporations can put you in corporate "jail", lock you out of online services, or just disable or delete your identity being judge, jury and executioner...
With Government, there is some semblance of due process.
Sure, but the government is subject to popular pressures. They can't imprison or otherwise hassle even a substantial fraction of the population in any meaningful way. Corporations are not subject to popular pressure. They can hassle millions of Americans and get away with it.
As a practical matter, you have a lot more to fear from corporations misusing your private data to deny you jobs, mess up your credit, etc, than you do from government misusing your private data to shut down your anarchist political movement.
So now instead of a democratically elected government writing laws and appointing people to enforce them, a private corporation will "patrol" my online interactions...
This argument has solid logic, but I don't agree with underlying view of the world. The governments of the world can, and do force tech companies to do whatever they want in terms of privacy, security and other stuff. GDPR and Article 13, Net Neutrality, censorship and privacy issues in Russia and China... The only pushback I've seen by corporations is by PR and lobbying, and in the end, politicians seem to do whatever they want. Yes, company may be even wealthier than the government - but as long as government has monopoly on violence and can enforce it laws, corporations would only be comparable to banana republics and african failed states.
Maybe it's because corporations care about their users more than the government does? After all, they make money from selling their products, not from coercion.
Of course they can. It makes sense for the government to be able to arrest people, but I absolutely don't want to give corporations that right (especially not FAANG - judicial systems a bad enough as is, but Google's customer support is still a downgrade).
The government and the private sector are very different and what one of them can and can't do is not necessarily related to whether the other should or shouldn't be able to.
I think the government is more reasonable than the private corporations. As an example, I got suspended by Facebook yesterday with nobody to contact. All my friends from school, relatives, and former coworkers are gone - with most of them I was connected only via Facebook. All my messages in Facebook Messenger groups have been deleted! Everything that I ever posted, shared, or reacted to - gone! With no recourse - all at the mercy of some 20-year-old reviewer. Yeah, the government sucks, but private corporations suck much more! At least I can complain to the government and talk to real people!
I know there are alternatives to Facebook - I've pitched all of them to my friends, but people my age are still only on Facebook.
The worst part about corporate power is that writing laws to restrict the kinds of nonsense Apple and Google do is hard as fuck, tends to trample on more general rights. On the other hand, not doing anything lets the government pressure the corps to do stuff the government can't do, like censor stuff pretty indiscriminately, and is basically playing a straw libertarian that's merely allergic to the word "government" - private Ingsoc is fine.
Corporations are the governments private enforcement contractors. They’ll control the internet and we’ll work for them, and they’ll work for government.
See! Government involved in your life!
Nice job building a firewall between society and government control.
At the end of the day it’s all people. The semantic bubbles do nothing to change its all just people looking to externalize effort to live simpler themselves.
Your statement sounds like the doublespeak to me. At the end of the day, it's government that physically enforces things with relative impunity. The "power" of corporations in this context is just the power of government being used for corporate interests; it doesn't work the other way around.
While I agree both are bad, the government is far far worse than corporations disabling your accounts
There are ways to migate the risk from corporations, and diservify that risk across several corporations
There is not anyway to mitigate the risk from government, and the idea of "due process" is really a myth created by TV Shows
With the number of criminal offenses if an agent of the government desires you to be in jail you go to jail. I guarantee you have done something, at some point that they can manipulate a jury into convicting you over
We are a criminalized society, especially the US, the "land of the free" where we put more people in jail than anywhere in the world (officially anyway)
The difference is that giving the government more power is inherently dangerous. I can refuse to use a specific tech company’s product a lot easier than I can refuse to be under a government.
A corporation doesn’t have the power of the state to threaten to take away property or liberty.
Businesses cannot lock people in prison or send teams of soldiers in to arrest people. Businesses cannot (legally) send people or robots to assassinate others. I think there is a very big difference between businesses collecting information and governments collecting information -- because governments can do substantially more damage.
(Full disclosure: I currently work for one of the companies on the list.)
Corporations are not as powerless as you suppose. A corporation can send armed agents into your business to get you to pay fines for bypassing their monopoly (USPS). Corporations can get local and foreign governments to raid citizens and seize their assets and businesses (MPAA Vs. Megaupload). Corporations can and regularly bankrupt ordinary citizens for spurious reasons.
Perhaps more importantly, corporations, thorough their lobbying, all but control the government as it stands today. Very little happens there that they do not direct. The only reason SOPA did not pass was due to corporations expressing their displeasure.
This is not OK, and "but private companies can do what they want" really needs to be rethought to reflect reality. We have governments essentially using corporations to get around their own legal restrictions.
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