Hacker News Reader

Comment by sacheendra | Hacker News Reader

For the sake of argument, they are at the mercy of voters is only true if voters cannot be influenced by these companies. Today's tech companies can influence voters in subtle ways an run huge PR campaigns to influence voters. In the future, only favourable legislators will come into power and laws, precedent and changing mindset will make it difficult for for a judge to rule against them.

The difference between modern tech giants and erstwhile powerful companies like standard oil is that tech giants are much closer to people's daily lives and occupy some much of their time. This way people are attached and strong feelings about Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. that they didn't have towards Standard Oil.

View on HN

> The difference between modern tech giants and erstwhile powerful companies like standard oil is that tech giants are much closer to people's daily lives

That's incorrect. Read the history of Standard Oil. They aggressively sought to get into people's daily lives. In fact, they may have been the first massive corporation to ever do so at an all-encompassing national level. They leveraged every bit of their power and wealth to distribute down to the town -> household level, with their fuels and free lanterns to burn their fuels. They waged Edison-style fear PR campaigns at that micro economic level, trying to get into people's homes commercially (correctly noting their product was mostly safer than the older alternatives). Their distribution channels by design reached into the daily lives of nearly every person in America (this is before the automobile had reached such distribution). Their in-your-home position was drastically more important in its day, as a critical basic needs upgrade, than the position Facebook occupies today. I would specifically suggest you research Standard Oil's numerous consumer oriented businesses.

I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for the info. This was the fallacy of looking at the past from a current perspective.

> Today's tech companies can influence voters in subtle ways and run huge PR campaigns to influence voters. In the future, only favourable legislators will come into power and laws ...

But favorable to which corporate interest or outside agency (Russian hackers)?

The corporate interests won't align on every issue or candidate, so they won't be influencing votes all the same. What's good for Google won't always be what's good for Amazon, or the Chinese government.

It's the various competing interests that somewhat cancel out. And it's not like other interests with power and money aren't aware of the reach of tech companies, and won't seek to use that to their advantage. Consider how traditional media has been used.

Or do you think the news organizations and tv/radio stations had all the power before?

Trump being elected wasn't the will of any of the tech giants. It's more of a platform that's used for whatever interest has the means to abuse it, such as pushing fake news.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com