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Comment by puttycat | Hacker News Reader

Agree that there's something fishy/missing in this story. Never say never, but I find it extremely unlikely that Google/Amazon lawyers, based in the US, would agree to such a blatantly mafia-like scheme.

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First day on this planet?

Wouldn't the lawyers be based in Israel - under some Israel-based shell/subsidiary of Google/Amazon, that owns the data centers, and complies with local law?

There is no way a US company would enter this sort of deal with Israel where they promise to circumvent a gag order. The money isn't worth going to jail for and the execs signing the deal would go to jail and they have little to benefit from. Story has no sources and makes no sense. Either the Guardian is reporting some rumor or they're just making stuff up.

Is it really that difficult to believe it could be accurate? If we take at face value what has been written about other big tech companies (mainly thinking of Facebook) as they grew their relationship in countries such as the People’s Republic of China, we also see they had to sweeten the deal by giving the government more power over how they could use the services.

I do think it’s kind of a different situation though because apparently the employees of Facebook could have gotten into legal trouble in those other countries they were trying to expand into.

Nobody is going to jail for this, and they know it.

Larry Ellison, biggest private donor to the IDF, enters the chat.

I don't know about Google but Amazon works with lawyers and other roles to routinely operate illegal union-busting strategies. It is blatantly illegal behavior that they use all their might to get away with. I don't know why you would find it so unbelievably surprising that they would do illegal mafia-like things.

It's certainly very interesting and difficult to explain...

> a blatantly mafia-like scheme.

Yeap...they would never do it ....

"Tech, crypto, tobacco, other companies fund Trump’s White House ballroom" - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/23/trump-ballroom-dono...

> I find it extremely unlikely that Google/Amazon lawyers, based in the US, would agree to such a blatantly mafia-like scheme.

I trust The Guardian. So I agree It was unlikely. I find it very sad

Very sad

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