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bobosha 4y ago
>these businesses are free-standing entities that are not at all beholden to "we the people" simply because they happen to be private. strawman fallacy Imo.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  I don't really think it is. Many of the folks arguing this is acceptable claim that it's a private company so they can do whatever they'd like. That's clearly not true. Would you care to put forth a different claim that you seem to think is being made, that I'm not addressing?
0xBDB 4y ago
>Employees are a resource provided by "the public" (they are the public). Corporation is Latin for "body of people". They are the public too. 58 percent of Americans own stock. The largest shareholders (like BlackRock) are largely fiduciaries for pension funds, i.e., the working class. I'll grant that corporate governance in the West largely sucks, but the owners of the body of the people are also the people. >The internet that businesses use to sell things online - funded by the public. The phones that the public sector employees who built the Internet used to communicate? Funded by the private sector (at least, initially. If we're being realistic both phones and the Internet are the product of a mix of public and private funding). This does not give AT&T the right to run the government. Your others are similar, except moreso for resources like roads that the government provides that could at least theoretically be provided by the private sector. Not saying your ideology is wrong; I'm saying it can't be supported with "you didn't build that." Sometimes they didn't get there by themselves, but the public definitely didn't generally get there by itself either.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  Glad to see we agree. My whole point is that claiming that we cannot regulate a company because they are "private" is an obvious fallacy - and that's exactly what the folks defending these companies claim... "They are private, so we cannot stop them from arbitrarily locking people out". But that's utter bullshit, and I'm growing very weary of the argument we should give companies the power to arbitrarily deny service with no explanation and no recourse. I don't mind the ban, I mind the lack of proper recourse. > Sometimes they didn't get there by themselves, but the public definitely didn't generally get there by itself either. It's almost like we're a society, and we must balance the needs of all parties. I'm pretty sure that being arbitrarily locked out of a digital system with no recourse is a potential major harm for folks - and I don't think the justification that "it's part of the EULA" is appropriate. At a minimum, I'd expect to see laws demanding the return of any relevant data (the user's property). But we don't even have that. It's time for regulation...
- ouid 4y ago
  There is a very important difference between a subset of the public and the public. The prisoner's dilemma is the basic template for most of that difference. Autonomous subsets of society act in their own interest to the detriment of society, and by extension, their own detriment. The individual fiduciary responsibilities of each corporation create a wasteland in aggregate. No one wants to fucking live in this apocalyptic hellscape of advertising, manipulation, deception, and corruption that we have created for ourselves, but no one is willing to give it up either because they have no power to force everyone else to. In order to solve the prisoners dilemma, you do, in fact, need a monopoly on force. You need the entire public, and the will and capability to punish defectors.