How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
> The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath.
I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
Let’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!
> They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved.
If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad.
Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component.
You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.
> What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist.
So if I want to start a small business, say a mom and pop restaurant, the public has to approve it first? You must be joking. Most businesses are small businesses. Hamstringing them is a recipe for disaster. Our regulatory system already disadvantages small businesses in countless ways. Indeed, that's part of the reason why large businesses can get away with so much.
The public already has a way to disapprove a business: don't buy from it. If nobody buys what the business is selling, it goes out of business.
The real oversight the public should be exercising, but isn't, is to vote out of office politicians that allow large businesses to buy their way out of trouble.
> The public already has a way to disapprove a business: don't buy from it. If nobody buys what the business is selling, it goes out of business.
This “let the market decide” approach is clearly not working. It assumes that only the direct customers of a business are the stakeholders that matter, because they have the wallets to vote with. There are many, many companies that the general public do not buy things from yet suffer their harms. There are a lot of terrible businesses, large and small, that I don’t purchase from which I’d vote in a heartbeat to get rid of if I had the opportunity.
> There are many, many companies that the general public do not buy things from yet suffer their harms.
Examples, please? I find this claim extremely dubious.
> There are a lot of terrible businesses, large and small, that I don’t purchase from which I’d vote in a heartbeat to get rid of if I had the opportunity.
Of course, because you personally don't depend on those business for anything. (At least you appear to be assuming you don't--though you might indirectly. But let's assume you don't even indirectly.) What about the people who do?
You have to use a service that harvests your data for that to happen. That's your choice. Nobody is forcing you. There is certainly no need to have a public vote to outlaw the companies. (Now, if you were to propose that our lawmakers outlaw the ad-supported business model, so that companies providing the services that now harvest data to make money would have to make the users of their services paying customers instead...)
Also, do you buy anything that the advertisers who buy your data are selling?
All change is destructive. No matter how bad something is, someone depends on how it is right now. Someone will at the very least be inconvenienced by it changing
The fact is, no company actually primarily exists to employ people, and people lose their jobs to this basic fact all the time, sometimes for no reason other than that some investor expects extremely marginal gains from signaling that they are serious about cutting costs
Also, the dissolution of a company and dispersal of its assets could include allocations for severance pay to cushion the blow if that's a concern, which is not always available to people who are hit by random layoffs
Perhaps the threat of actual extreme punishment would incentivize companies to behave such that the punishment never gets invoked?
Currently the worst thing companies ever face is a little itty bitty fine and maybe a toothless regulator telling them “Pretty please would you mind not doing that again? If it’s not too inconvenient to shareholders that is…”
