Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

Sure. I was there; I remember. I think it was a waste of time but ultimately harmless; it resulted in a few (private, moneyed) corporations deciding not to sell some music that the government had mandated be labeled (which, to be clear, is a wide power the government has; perhaps overused here, but it's no a violation of anyone's rights that they make companies put the ingredient lists on food). Then the Internet happened and that whole thing became irrelevant.

Florida is a great example to study these money-power-vs-political-power effects, because were the tables reversed people currently supporting Disney would be horrified. Imagine it was Rupert Murdoch and Fox World with an ultra-right-white-national enclave utterly immune to legal oversight, and the duly-elected Democratic government trying impotently to reign them in. Much as I like the result of Disney;s pushback, the means are deeply disquieting and speak to a completely-dysfunctional corporate-power-vs-state-power relationship that is ripe for abuse. And the wheels of corporate power turn glacially relative to government power; DeSantis, barring a state constitutional amendment, is gone in 2024 as a state governor, but Rupert Murdoch was CEO of News Corp / Fox for 36 years.

I'm not 100% for corporate power or 100% for government power. I'm for balancing and pitting the two against each other because they're both effective tools for checking the worst abuses of the other. And make no mistake: when it comes to the FAANGs, what we're seeing is patterns of abuse that need to be reigned in. Requirements for auditing and oversight can be overdone, but in practice, in 2023, the tech sector has been allowed to run with a laissez-faire attitude for decades and has become a vital piece of the modern societal fabric; as a general principle, anything that vital to daily human experience for most citizens needs government oversight to ensure its legal compliance before it becomes Standard Oil or Bell Telephone or Microsoft or Fox Media or, indeed, Disney... Something unanswerable to all but itself.

This era of existence is marked by humanity trying to forge a path between a 1984 future and a Brave New World future. There are no simple answers for power allocation.

So you think it is okay that the government trampled on the free speech rights of rappers who were talking about police corruption and there experience years before the internet became ubiquitous where anyone could get it out?

> Imagine it was Rupert Murdoch and Fox World with an armor, always taste no and the duly-elected Democratic government trying impotently to reign them in

And the government only tried to “rein them in” by punishing them after they spoke out.

> when it comes to the FAANGs, what we're seeing is patterns of abuse that need to be reigned in.

Well the difference is that no corporation has ever stopped me because I “looked suspicious” because I was walking through my own neighborhood that I looked like I didn’t belong. Nor does it have qualified immunity to get away with doing almost anything. I have agency to not be under the auspices of any corporation - especially a search engine. I don’t have that power under the government. There is no balance on government power except not to give it anymore than absolutely necessary.

I’ve never had to worry about my son being harassed by any corporation just for driving down the street.

And do you think the government is just going to be happy with surveiling employees?

Did they though? I mean, to be clear, I'm sure they tried. But both back then and now, the songs were easy to get and is still easy to get. If anything, the whole affair Streisand Effected the hell out of them.

I think the story's a good example of a failed attempt at abuse of power because the system of checks and balances worked (it would have failed harder but for a single, powerful, monolithic corporation agreeing with the goal and de-stocking the product from its shelves).

> Well the difference is that no corporation has ever stopped me because I “looked suspicious” because I was walking through my own neighborhood that I looked like I didn’t belong

No; they merely cut access to your account because you look suspicious, such as having pictures in your private Drive account that their algorithm decided were child pornography, locking up or deleting all data you had hosted by them, with no recourse and no hope of retrieval. Google's within their rights to cut an account, but there's no arguing there's a difference in kind of the experience someone online has if they have a Google account vs. being banned from having one. It's not nearly as bad as government abuse of power; it's really quite bad, and only government has the authority to make it better because the corporations are otherwise unaccountable.

> Nor does it have qualified immunity

Who backstops the terms of service violation system? When Google demonetizes trans-friendly or trans-inclusive content because their inscrutable TOS and algorithm decide such content is "sexually explicit" (read: offends the sensibilities of schoolboards and advertisers), who has the power to say that's not what that term means? Nobody. I guess with YouTube, we can always take our business to its competitor, doesnt-exist.com.

> I have agency to not be under the auspices of any corporation

Yes; you have the digital equivalent of the freedom to live in a van down by the river, banished from the nice neighborhoods. Vive Liberte.

(To be clear, I don't have concrete answers here. There are no easy answers; it's a complicated problem. But that means the answer also isn't as easy as "Government already has too much power." Perhaps it currently has too much of the wrong kind of power, and not enough of the right kind).

The thing is, monopolies tend to be on the wrong side of the Innovator's Dilemma, but they short-circuit it by just buying the disruptors out. Think about how many technologies Google has developed internally versus bought and scaled up. If we prohibited them from buying startups, then the company, being a slow and lumbering monopoly, would eventually crumble like Kodak did.

Some scrutiny at the current banking system for keeping interest rates at 0% for a decade and change might also be deserved. Cheap capital makes it cheaper to buy your competition out.

[0] The Tyranny of Structurelessness is an essay that alleged that leaderlessness in various radical feminist and other left-libertarian movements was a smokescreen for unaccountable and undocumented leadership structures. This also applies to right-libertarian movements, Bitcoin, Ethereum DAOs, etc.

In the 1980s how did you produce or distribute music without the internet and computers that could produce music? The police arrested NWA at a concert for rapping “Fuck the police”.

> No; they merely cut access to your account because you look suspicious, such as having pictures in your private Drive account that their algorithm decided were child pornography, locking up or deleting all data you had hosted by them, with no recourse and no hope of retrieval.

I can and do have multiple backups of my media (Google Drive, iCloud, Amazon Drive, and they are stored using a separate account in AWS S3 Glacier. Are you really comparing losing some pictures and data with losing your freedom or being harassed by a cop?

> Yes; you have the digital equivalent of the freedom to live in a van down by the river, banished from the nice neighborhoods. Vive Liberte.

Yes guess how hard it is to live a good life after getting arrested because you got on the wrong side of an overzealous Justice system? Or got shot by a trigger happy cop?