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This comment is almost a parody of Hacker News comments: "The evil statists are only bringing down the hammer because the glorious technologists DARED to threa

This comment is almost a parody of Hacker News comments: "The evil statists are only bringing down the hammer because the glorious technologists DARED to threaten their power!" The reality is that what's driving this is the end of the honeymoon phase with tech. There used to be a general sense of trust in the big tech companies. People could take Google's "Don't Be Evil" stance seriously. This very comment has this view as its unspoken premise, that the tech companies are good and glorious and it's outside forces that are harmful and want to suppress them. As a result, they were treated with a special hands-off approach in most areas. It was the tech companies themselves that eroded that trust over the last decade + through their behavior and interaction with people. As a result, there's no longer that store of goodwill and a willingness to extend them special treatment, so now they get treated like every other company. Because, of course, whatever they tried to sell the world, they WERE just like any other company the whole time. They just had a shinier surface.

Erlangolem 9y ago
You say parody, I say honest representation voted to the top of the page, on article that was knocked off the front page by flagging or mods. Part of the problem is that quite a few people here are representative of the broader industry which is full of young people who think the last decade and half are just how the world works. These are the people who look at all progress as though it must conform to Moore’s Law, and think the unregulated free-for-all of their industry so far is just how it is. Reality is slow to catch up to new things, but it is utterly inevitable.