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Comment by ShroudedNight | Hacker News Reader

> Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization ... is purely charity.

Duty is not charity. It would be perfectly reasonable for society to determine that YouTube incurs a duty to its content creation partners, and at no point should that be considered requesting a favour.

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Allow me to clarify: The word "charity" is used in the perverted capitalistic sense, where Google's predominant "duty" is first and foremost to its shareholders. The capitalist incentive structure requires no more than the bare minimum of customer service from Google.

I agree that Google has a moral duty to take care of the people who choose to put their trust in their platforms.

You are implicitly assuming that the shareholder primacy theory of corporate governance is the only legitimate one. It is not. The business judgement rule allows corporate directors very wide latitude in how they choose to run the business. Google very much can hire more CSRs, exactly because they are insanely profitable on a per employee basis, but they choose not to, for reasons unknown, but likely out of concern for the stock price.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule

Small clarification: I'm assuming that shareholder obligation is the predominant force upon corporate governance, not the only one.

But, point taken.

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