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This is typically called a “Government”. In the US we used to have this at the town, state and federal level. And these “governments” wouldn’t just work with on

This is typically called a “Government”. In the US we used to have this at the town, state and federal level. And these “governments” wouldn’t just work with one company, but a many companies. The way they worked is people would vote for representatives that help make decisions that were in the interests of people, and this would reign in the power of extremely large and powerful companies. In some parts of Europe they still have these. Unfortunately in the US companies were foolishly permitted to both purchase the voting power of representatives and directly influence the will of the people to render the government virtually useless (though still a useful distraction for the people)

fakedang 6y ago
And even grant themselves equal rights as citizens and influence government.
- arcbyte 6y ago
  Nope. Organizations come in many kinds, including corporations. They're all just ways of organizing people, who have rights that they can choose to come together to exercise. That's it.
  - hashkb 6y ago
    Are you saying that the political will of a corporation is no more or less than the sum of the political wills of the people in the corporation?
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      In theory, yes. In practice though, it's the shareholders that call the shots, and the employees are threatened with getting fired if they try and organize and start making demands. But that's where governments can come in, and implement things like basic worker rights.
      - scatters 6y ago
        In theory, that's how it works in practice. In practice, though, the shareholders have a lot less power than that: they only get to vote at the AGM, and that's very much a managed democracy - the managers being the C-suite, and the majority of shares held by institutional investors who will vote whatever way is recommended by the officers.
      - Bakary 6y ago
        I don't think it's even true in theory since corporations live in a larger context of the country or countries they are in. As for countries themselves, we could argue that they also live in a context of all the other countries, but I would say that for the reasonably large ones it is the case their political will is roughly equivalent to the collective sum.
    - inscionent 6y ago
      Technically the political will of a corporation is no more or less than the sum of its bank account. To this point maybe no more or less than the sum of its Named Officers' political wills.
  - blackbrokkoli 6y ago
    That is wrong actually. Organizations are even somewhat defined by having goals or agendas independent of the entire body of people making it up. That is not neccessarily bad (It would suck if the tax office would entirely redefine itself every couple year) but it is something to be aware of.
  - arghwhat 6y ago
    Nope, corporations are what is called a "legal person", which is, well, a "person" of sorts. That is, it is its own entity with its own will and liability for its actions. This legal person is effectively controlled by a very small group of people, but it outlives them as these titles are replaced (new CEO, changing board). Everyone else contribute to its function, but not its interests. They are recruited to work for the entity through an uneven symbiotic relationship, where the entity covers the simple short-term needs of individuals. It then uses it the power amassed to benefit itself, and those in control. Either by simply being large, or by trading the immense resources it can produce. To the entity, the individual is no more important than a random cell in your body (left small toe fibroblast anyone?). And just like in your body, only a small number of cells get to drive the machine. This is very different from a grouping of individuals, where individuals are merely cooperating towards a democratically elected goal.
    - naim08 6y ago
      Thats right, corporations have legal person status & protection (kinda odd) like any other American citizen, but you can argue they have more rights than the average american citizen. Anyway, corporations, for-profit that is, are driven by one tenet & one tenet alone, which is their bottom-line. And they only answer to their ruling shareholders. Customers, employees, their own product, the USA govt, etc are all secondary.
- akarma 6y ago
  Highly recommend The Corporation by Joel Bakan. It digs into how corporations are essentially psychopaths — they put profit first, and if they appear to be good or generous, it's only because the money it takes to cultivate that image is going to be a net benefit to them.
blackbrokkoli 6y ago
I had the exact same thought when reading the title and only came here to see if there would be clarification in the post body. No, it's just...a government. This has to be peak tech-bro thinking. Also, it is obviously not the solution. What would prevent this, ahem, union from developing the same cancer US (and by extension) Western governments have right now? The problem is at a societal level, which makes it so uncomfortable. If you discuss this, you are also discussing astronomical SF salaries, Move Fast And Break Things, Software Is Eating The World and all that stuff the HN community is very proud of. So let's dicuss a not government-government instead! Also see the AM/FM dilemma (Actual Machines / Fucking Magic)...
kingludite 6y ago
> This is typically called a “Government”. In the US we used to have this at the town, state and federal level. And these “governments” wouldn’t just work with one company, but a many companies. Sounds like a good idea! > The way they worked is people would vote for representatives that help make decisions that were in the interests of people, and this would reign in the power of extremely large and powerful companies. Ah yes, people were so sophisticated before the internet. I find it hard to remember how things even worked. The representation was a fantastic solution for the communication over distance problem. Today it would be rather silly to propose representation. I don't need anyone to represent me. Strength in numbers is enough. While big [worker] unions are powerful they do tend to get distracted by large issues. Smaller tailored unions spend all of their time on their much smaller scope. It is also very helpful for Google to see which issues users would like to see addressed. They probably have them documented internally already but cant find a way to prioritize them. There could be constructive dialog rather than a moaning contest that addresses only the company most moaned about. As with employee unions, being a member makes the employer act entirely different.
- kiliantics 6y ago
  I think representation is not only intended to solve the distance problem, but is also a form of efficiency, so that you don't have to weigh in on every little detail of society's organisation and therefore have time to get on with your own business. That said, we throw away a lot for this "efficiency" and end up with corrupt political parties and lobbies that act completely against our interests. Maybe we can't have a true democracy unless everyone is putting a lot of time into participating in decision-making, rather than just hitting the ballot box once every couple years. I actually think this idea of doing things the "hard way" usually getting better results applies in almost everything, personally. There are lots of alternative models out there to the one that is glorified in the US, invented by the Founding Father deities some centuries ago. There has been more than a little innovation since. Worker co-ops -- which have existed for almost as long as the US, or longer in some sense -- have experimented with many structures where workers or consumers, or both, share power in how the company is run. Alternative government structures with more direct representation and delegation have also been attempted, e.g. the democratic confederalism approach in Rojava, which also includes worker and land co-operatives for organising their industries. I think this discussion is also leading towards the suggestion that Google's services should become more like utilities and therefore be publicly owned and managed. Basically nationalised. This makes a lot of sense when you consider how powerful the search engine is and how much of every person's data and flow of information is controlled by Google. However, it wouldn't make sense, or at least it wouldn't be fair, for the US to be the government that nationalises Google, since it's not only the US population which uses this "utility". It seems we need to invent a new kind of concept that considers the global population as a "public" that owns and controls these vital global resources.
minikites 6y ago
The parent post is a really stunning example of why more STEM majors need required humanities classes. Without knowledge of history, you get Elon Musk inventing a worse subway system from first principles and nerds holding him up as the next Steve Jobs because they don't know any better either.
paultopia 6y ago
Disagree. Yes, government regulation would be nice. But it's a little unfair to accuse the OP of trying to reinvent government by proposing that consumers organize outside of government. People organize to engage in collective action outside of governments all the time. In addition to labor unions, consider civil society nonprofits. It's not bizarre or (as another comment suggested) some kind of tech-bro magical thinking to say "hey, the government isn't regulating this group of people, let's organize to get some collective power going."
- xhkkffbf 6y ago
  Absolutely. And remember we're not customers, we're the product. So you might call us workers too.
  - geofft 6y ago
    We're the "product" of services like advertising, but I've seen very few individuals express opinions on Google's advertising product (beyond "stop," or at best "stop tracking me"). Our opinions tend to be on services like Gmail and Drive and Reader and Hangouts. In that case, we're closer to a customer - or more accurately, we're a positive externality. Google does offer paid support for most of these services, including an account rep that you can actually talk to in person. But you have to be paying for them. Individuals who use Gmail for free are effectively just publicity for Google so they can convince large employers to pay them for Gmail.
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      > Individuals who use Gmail for free are effectively just publicity for Google so they can convince large employers to pay them for Gmail. I don't think this is accurate. Having users logged in while using Google Search is worth far, far more to Google than the GSuite sales bump from having free Gmail users.
- airza 6y ago
  The magical thinking comes from trying to organize a significant portion of Google's customer base (all android phone users, all google search users, etc) spontaneously into a body that can really damage their value proposition financially. In a labor union _all_ of the value is generated by a bunch of people who are geographically close together and able to organize more easily :)
idrios 6y ago
But this actually brings up a good question about the role of unions to begin with. Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? I like OP's suggestion of having a consumer's union. In an analogy to a software stack, having the government responsible for this is analogous to building a monolith, while making unions is analogous to a microservices solution. Integrating this role into the government could become bureaucratic and comlicated, maybe ineffective because of it, but a consumer's union might work but with it's own set of particularities.
- silexia 6y ago
  A consumer union is a fantastic idea! If you give government this power, they will not listen to consumers or the business... Government only listens to politicians. Google wants more revenue and is highly motivated to work with a consumer group.
  - Chant-I-CRW 6y ago
    When a workers' union calls for a strike it only works if most of the members support the strike. The potential benefits must outweigh the risk of hardship and inconvenience. Often the majority of workers support the strike because they are in a shared situation and will all receive some level of benefit if it works. A consumer union, to have enough momentum to actually make the Googles and Amazons even blink, would need hundreds of thousands of members. That vast quantity would need to agree to collective action and then follow through. If the consumer union reps determined the best way to convince Google to make a change was to hit them in the pocket book then the majority of the union members would have to cancel subscriptions and deal with the inconvenience. It is my pessimistic opinion that the general consumer base would not follow through on whatever action the union selected. In the unlikely event they did follow through, even a hundred thousand users dropping a Google product or leaving Amazon Prime would barely impact those companies enough to make them alter their policies or improve their service levels.
    - vagrantJin 6y ago
pvorb 6y ago
In the EU, a company can choose from a pool of many governments and picks the one that suits it the best and then gets access to every other country. And there are not that many other countries, which have a government which fit yoir definition.
cataphract 6y ago
More like a Consumer Protection Association. They're using involved in lobbying the government, but not just that: also resolution of disputes between members and companies and doing product reviews, for instance.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Companies also pay lobbyists to influence the government itself.
tehjoker 6y ago
No, unions and governments are very different things. The fact that we left things to the government without grassroots power is in part what allowed regulatory capture to persist.
- eigenrick 6y ago
  I think they were specifically referring to the "Customer's Union" Employees Unions are unions. The needs supplied by a Customer's Union should, in part, be supplied by a Government. The other needs could be called a "Consortium" or a "Industry Working Group". If it were targeted specifically at Google, there might be legal ramifications. So such a Working Group might need to be focused on Ad-buyers or SEO Professionals at large. Such groups already exist.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    An "Industry Working Group" is an elite consortium and rarely acts in the interests of the people. A grassroots organization can focus on Google or anything else it wants to do. If it needs to broaden its umbrella slightly that would be better as its more sustainable.
anonuser123456 6y ago
You are free to simply NOT USE GOOGLE. It’s not that hard. Literally, I abandoned all my Google services in about a week with no interruption to my needs. Imposing your authoritarian will on people in a competitive marketplace is authoritarian socialism. It would be one thing if Google offered something akin to a monopoly. But they don’t. Full stop. Everything they do as a service is done by someone else (and better in most cases).
pietrovismara 6y ago
In Italy, one of the biggest[0] (if not the biggest) supermarket chain is a consumers' co-operative[1]. They are just filling gaps and often preceding legislation regarding ethical consumption, I think it's a pretty good concept after all. -[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Italy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Italy) -[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative
solidsnack9000 6y ago
That is a misunderstanding. No, a government is not an advocate for every private interest shared by sufficiently many people. In fact, the tendency to treat it that way is exactly what is causing so many problems in the USA. Civil society organizations are what historically made democracy stable in both the USA and in Britain (Francis Fukuyama explores this point in some detail). They counterbalance both the government and commercial organizations. We really should be thinking more about how to organize to make common cause without it turning into a question of who controls the government at a particular time. To a substantial degree, the stable and useful function of government in a market democracy is providing a fair way for different groups to sort out their differences -- in this case, Google and consumers -- and that can't work when the government is seen to belong to one of those groups.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thotsBgone 6y ago
But is there anything stopping people from forming a second government on top of the first one?
orblivion 6y ago
FWIW the idea of a Consumer's Union already exists (at least in name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

fakedang 6y ago

And even grant themselves equal rights as citizens and influence government.

arcbyte 6y ago
Nope. Organizations come in many kinds, including corporations. They're all just ways of organizing people, who have rights that they can choose to come together to exercise. That's it.
- hashkb 6y ago
  Are you saying that the political will of a corporation is no more or less than the sum of the political wills of the people in the corporation?
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    In theory, yes. In practice though, it's the shareholders that call the shots, and the employees are threatened with getting fired if they try and organize and start making demands. But that's where governments can come in, and implement things like basic worker rights.
    - scatters 6y ago
      In theory, that's how it works in practice. In practice, though, the shareholders have a lot less power than that: they only get to vote at the AGM, and that's very much a managed democracy - the managers being the C-suite, and the majority of shares held by institutional investors who will vote whatever way is recommended by the officers.
    - Bakary 6y ago
      I don't think it's even true in theory since corporations live in a larger context of the country or countries they are in. As for countries themselves, we could argue that they also live in a context of all the other countries, but I would say that for the reasonably large ones it is the case their political will is roughly equivalent to the collective sum.
  - inscionent 6y ago
    Technically the political will of a corporation is no more or less than the sum of its bank account. To this point maybe no more or less than the sum of its Named Officers' political wills.
- blackbrokkoli 6y ago
  That is wrong actually. Organizations are even somewhat defined by having goals or agendas independent of the entire body of people making it up. That is not neccessarily bad (It would suck if the tax office would entirely redefine itself every couple year) but it is something to be aware of.
- arghwhat 6y ago
  Nope, corporations are what is called a "legal person", which is, well, a "person" of sorts. That is, it is its own entity with its own will and liability for its actions. This legal person is effectively controlled by a very small group of people, but it outlives them as these titles are replaced (new CEO, changing board). Everyone else contribute to its function, but not its interests. They are recruited to work for the entity through an uneven symbiotic relationship, where the entity covers the simple short-term needs of individuals. It then uses it the power amassed to benefit itself, and those in control. Either by simply being large, or by trading the immense resources it can produce. To the entity, the individual is no more important than a random cell in your body (left small toe fibroblast anyone?). And just like in your body, only a small number of cells get to drive the machine. This is very different from a grouping of individuals, where individuals are merely cooperating towards a democratically elected goal.
  - naim08 6y ago
    Thats right, corporations have legal person status & protection (kinda odd) like any other American citizen, but you can argue they have more rights than the average american citizen. Anyway, corporations, for-profit that is, are driven by one tenet & one tenet alone, which is their bottom-line. And they only answer to their ruling shareholders. Customers, employees, their own product, the USA govt, etc are all secondary.
akarma 6y ago
Highly recommend The Corporation by Joel Bakan. It digs into how corporations are essentially psychopaths — they put profit first, and if they appear to be good or generous, it's only because the money it takes to cultivate that image is going to be a net benefit to them.

blackbrokkoli 6y ago

I had the exact same thought when reading the title and only came here to see if there would be clarification in the post body. No, it's just...a government. This has to be peak tech-bro thinking. Also, it is obviously not the solution. What would prevent this, ahem, union from developing the same cancer US (and by extension) Western governments have right now? The problem is at a societal level, which makes it so uncomfortable. If you discuss this, you are also discussing astronomical SF salaries, Move Fast And Break Things, Software Is Eating The World and all that stuff the HN community is very proud of. So let's dicuss a not government-government instead! Also see the AM/FM dilemma (Actual Machines / Fucking Magic)...

kingludite 6y ago

> This is typically called a “Government”. In the US we used to have this at the town, state and federal level. And these “governments” wouldn’t just work with one company, but a many companies. Sounds like a good idea! > The way they worked is people would vote for representatives that help make decisions that were in the interests of people, and this would reign in the power of extremely large and powerful companies. Ah yes, people were so sophisticated before the internet. I find it hard to remember how things even worked. The representation was a fantastic solution for the communication over distance problem. Today it would be rather silly to propose representation. I don't need anyone to represent me. Strength in numbers is enough. While big [worker] unions are powerful they do tend to get distracted by large issues. Smaller tailored unions spend all of their time on their much smaller scope. It is also very helpful for Google to see which issues users would like to see addressed. They probably have them documented internally already but cant find a way to prioritize them. There could be constructive dialog rather than a moaning contest that addresses only the company most moaned about. As with employee unions, being a member makes the employer act entirely different.

kiliantics 6y ago
I think representation is not only intended to solve the distance problem, but is also a form of efficiency, so that you don't have to weigh in on every little detail of society's organisation and therefore have time to get on with your own business. That said, we throw away a lot for this "efficiency" and end up with corrupt political parties and lobbies that act completely against our interests. Maybe we can't have a true democracy unless everyone is putting a lot of time into participating in decision-making, rather than just hitting the ballot box once every couple years. I actually think this idea of doing things the "hard way" usually getting better results applies in almost everything, personally. There are lots of alternative models out there to the one that is glorified in the US, invented by the Founding Father deities some centuries ago. There has been more than a little innovation since. Worker co-ops -- which have existed for almost as long as the US, or longer in some sense -- have experimented with many structures where workers or consumers, or both, share power in how the company is run. Alternative government structures with more direct representation and delegation have also been attempted, e.g. the democratic confederalism approach in Rojava, which also includes worker and land co-operatives for organising their industries. I think this discussion is also leading towards the suggestion that Google's services should become more like utilities and therefore be publicly owned and managed. Basically nationalised. This makes a lot of sense when you consider how powerful the search engine is and how much of every person's data and flow of information is controlled by Google. However, it wouldn't make sense, or at least it wouldn't be fair, for the US to be the government that nationalises Google, since it's not only the US population which uses this "utility". It seems we need to invent a new kind of concept that considers the global population as a "public" that owns and controls these vital global resources.

minikites 6y ago

The parent post is a really stunning example of why more STEM majors need required humanities classes. Without knowledge of history, you get Elon Musk inventing a worse subway system from first principles and nerds holding him up as the next Steve Jobs because they don't know any better either.

paultopia 6y ago

Disagree. Yes, government regulation would be nice. But it's a little unfair to accuse the OP of trying to reinvent government by proposing that consumers organize outside of government. People organize to engage in collective action outside of governments all the time. In addition to labor unions, consider civil society nonprofits. It's not bizarre or (as another comment suggested) some kind of tech-bro magical thinking to say "hey, the government isn't regulating this group of people, let's organize to get some collective power going."

xhkkffbf 6y ago
Absolutely. And remember we're not customers, we're the product. So you might call us workers too.
- geofft 6y ago
  We're the "product" of services like advertising, but I've seen very few individuals express opinions on Google's advertising product (beyond "stop," or at best "stop tracking me"). Our opinions tend to be on services like Gmail and Drive and Reader and Hangouts. In that case, we're closer to a customer - or more accurately, we're a positive externality. Google does offer paid support for most of these services, including an account rep that you can actually talk to in person. But you have to be paying for them. Individuals who use Gmail for free are effectively just publicity for Google so they can convince large employers to pay them for Gmail.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    > Individuals who use Gmail for free are effectively just publicity for Google so they can convince large employers to pay them for Gmail. I don't think this is accurate. Having users logged in while using Google Search is worth far, far more to Google than the GSuite sales bump from having free Gmail users.
airza 6y ago
The magical thinking comes from trying to organize a significant portion of Google's customer base (all android phone users, all google search users, etc) spontaneously into a body that can really damage their value proposition financially. In a labor union _all_ of the value is generated by a bunch of people who are geographically close together and able to organize more easily :)

idrios 6y ago

But this actually brings up a good question about the role of unions to begin with. Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? I like OP's suggestion of having a consumer's union. In an analogy to a software stack, having the government responsible for this is analogous to building a monolith, while making unions is analogous to a microservices solution. Integrating this role into the government could become bureaucratic and comlicated, maybe ineffective because of it, but a consumer's union might work but with it's own set of particularities.

silexia 6y ago
A consumer union is a fantastic idea! If you give government this power, they will not listen to consumers or the business... Government only listens to politicians. Google wants more revenue and is highly motivated to work with a consumer group.
- Chant-I-CRW 6y ago
  When a workers' union calls for a strike it only works if most of the members support the strike. The potential benefits must outweigh the risk of hardship and inconvenience. Often the majority of workers support the strike because they are in a shared situation and will all receive some level of benefit if it works. A consumer union, to have enough momentum to actually make the Googles and Amazons even blink, would need hundreds of thousands of members. That vast quantity would need to agree to collective action and then follow through. If the consumer union reps determined the best way to convince Google to make a change was to hit them in the pocket book then the majority of the union members would have to cancel subscriptions and deal with the inconvenience. It is my pessimistic opinion that the general consumer base would not follow through on whatever action the union selected. In the unlikely event they did follow through, even a hundred thousand users dropping a Google product or leaving Amazon Prime would barely impact those companies enough to make them alter their policies or improve their service levels.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago

pvorb 6y ago

In the EU, a company can choose from a pool of many governments and picks the one that suits it the best and then gets access to every other country. And there are not that many other countries, which have a government which fit yoir definition.

cataphract 6y ago

More like a Consumer Protection Association. They're using involved in lobbying the government, but not just that: also resolution of disputes between members and companies and doing product reviews, for instance.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Companies also pay lobbyists to influence the government itself.

tehjoker 6y ago

No, unions and governments are very different things. The fact that we left things to the government without grassroots power is in part what allowed regulatory capture to persist.

eigenrick 6y ago
I think they were specifically referring to the "Customer's Union" Employees Unions are unions. The needs supplied by a Customer's Union should, in part, be supplied by a Government. The other needs could be called a "Consortium" or a "Industry Working Group". If it were targeted specifically at Google, there might be legal ramifications. So such a Working Group might need to be focused on Ad-buyers or SEO Professionals at large. Such groups already exist.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  An "Industry Working Group" is an elite consortium and rarely acts in the interests of the people. A grassroots organization can focus on Google or anything else it wants to do. If it needs to broaden its umbrella slightly that would be better as its more sustainable.

anonuser123456 6y ago

You are free to simply NOT USE GOOGLE. It’s not that hard. Literally, I abandoned all my Google services in about a week with no interruption to my needs. Imposing your authoritarian will on people in a competitive marketplace is authoritarian socialism. It would be one thing if Google offered something akin to a monopoly. But they don’t. Full stop. Everything they do as a service is done by someone else (and better in most cases).

pietrovismara 6y ago

In Italy, one of the biggest[0] (if not the biggest) supermarket chain is a consumers' co-operative[1]. They are just filling gaps and often preceding legislation regarding ethical consumption, I think it's a pretty good concept after all. -[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Italy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Italy) -[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative

solidsnack9000 6y ago

That is a misunderstanding. No, a government is not an advocate for every private interest shared by sufficiently many people. In fact, the tendency to treat it that way is exactly what is causing so many problems in the USA. Civil society organizations are what historically made democracy stable in both the USA and in Britain (Francis Fukuyama explores this point in some detail). They counterbalance both the government and commercial organizations. We really should be thinking more about how to organize to make common cause without it turning into a question of who controls the government at a particular time. To a substantial degree, the stable and useful function of government in a market democracy is providing a fair way for different groups to sort out their differences -- in this case, Google and consumers -- and that can't work when the government is seen to belong to one of those groups.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thotsBgone 6y ago

But is there anything stopping people from forming a second government on top of the first one?

orblivion 6y ago

FWIW the idea of a Consumer's Union already exists (at least in name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]