I think the discussion and analysis of each company's prior behaviour is exactly on point--the question before humanity in the general case is "what are these c

I think the discussion and analysis of each company's prior behaviour is exactly on point--the question before humanity in the general case is "what are these companies really up to?" Each (including Apple) has a hidden agenda. They can be both beneficial and harmful. They are not our friends! They deserve our scrutiny, suspicion and supervision. A company is a system that was created to pursue an agenda. That agenda is nothing like the agenda of a typical human individual (except at absurd levels of abstraction) and is not necessarily net-beneficial to actual humans in the short or the long run. It's an axiom of systems analysis that behaviour trumps speech when you are trying to figure out what a system is really up to. To say it another way, we would like to identify the actual operant utility functions of these companies, so we can predict what they are really working towards, and what their behaviour and impact might be in the future. Their prior behaviour is the best signal we have! To force the discussion to revolve around "laws" and "right" is to pretend that current ethical positions and laws are optimal and can't be gamed. A superficial inspection will show these premises are false. The ongoing work of governance is to try to figure out economic, social and legal rules that "work" for some consensus definition of "work". That requires a clear understanding of what is actually happening, and good scenario analysis for the range of possible outcomes (including unintended consequences). Maybe that's unrestricted free markets, maybe sometimes it isn't. Maybe it's the law as it currently stands, maybe it isn't.