Hacker News Reader

Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

For all of Google's talk of "don't be evil" - it's pretty amazing to me that this one tiny player has more balls to stand up for his principles & users than some monolithic organization like Google.

View on HN

Note that Lavabit's battle was fought in silence; the first we heard about it was the announcement that Lavabit would be shutting down.

Assuming similar warrants to other companies would also come with gag orders, there is no way to know whether Google has tried to fight. The only way we would know is if Larry Page announced they was closing up shop tomorrow.

Similar arguments apply to every tech company. I am certain that {Google,Yahoo,Microsoft,Facebook,Twitter} has received similar warrants, and has filed objections, and has been given the choice of compliance or corporate death.

I'm wondering what could have happened if these corporations didn't comply? It's hard to imagine a headlines like "US Government shuts down Microsoft because of refused total surveillance order".

"Steve Ballmer jailed for 'insider trading' replacement CEO outlines new government partnership"

China is probably instructive. There have been cases where Google has directly defied orders from the Chinese government. The result was that Google ceased doing business in the PRC, followed by a cat & mouse game where Google routed all Chinese searches through Hong Kong, which has a different legal system.

People like to make a lot of noise about the power of multinational corporations, but historically, when a corporation has defied a government the government usually wins. The only exception is when there is a wide disparity in power between the corporation's home country and the government it's in dispute with, and the corporation's own government backs it. (Eg. the British East India company vs. China, Google + Facebook + Twitter vs. Egypt.)

The reason for this is that business requires a stable legal system to work. Without the government's backing, a business's customers could simply run off with its goods & services and the business would have no legal recourse. It becomes impossible to conduct trade when the organization with a monopoly on physical force says "It's open season on Google." (Indeed, relations between Google and China had been frosty for several years before the shut-down because the Chinese government overtly favored Baidu, and the legal system in China is such that you can't conduct any significant business without some bureaucrat's say-so.)

Publicly held organizations cannot choose to close shop. They don't own the shop. Something I quote from Bruce Schneier was that if Google or Facebook were in the same position and the CEO refused to cooperate, the shareholders would just fire the existing CEO and get a less moral one!

Do you know who the controlling shareholders of Google and Facebook are?

Google: Page+Brin+Schmidt.

Facebook: Zuck

They aren't going to get fired.

Founders are not the sole owners of organizations. They do have a lot of shares but they did go through funding rounds and an IPO and already don't own a chunk of their businesses.

Individuals have balls, organizations rarely do.

Right - they have shareholders.

...who hold the company by the balls.

This is not unbelievable. Google has more to lose.

yes, but they also have much more resources to fight and from what we know so far they didn't even try.

yea they do have more resources to fight, but from a profit perspective, its unlikely to net any gains, and the gains cannot be only for google (fighting for public good is never profitable). Therefore, its much better to just comply, and take the risk that the users might find out later. Who knows, users might not care, or might not be able to move off google at all...

they don't have much to lose. If they're careful, they have backup servers in multiple places. If they can launder their money through offshore places, they can move their servers.

Like the trust and business of their users, both domestic and international? They had to assume that people would find out eventually, so why capitulate?

It's like giving in to extortion, you're just delaying the long-term inevitable while damaging yourself in the short-run as well.

Personally speaking, my trust in Google hasn't changed. I don't trust sensitive data there because of other agencies, but if the world changes because of Snowden, I will happily continue to use (most of) Google's services.

No they don't. This man has given up his livelihood. Google could shut down their (free) e-mail service, probably without having to fire a single employee.

Yes the amount of intelligence they could gather on each of their users would undoubtedly suffer, and so their ad revenue might eventually lose a bit of growth, but life (and business) would go on for Google.

Yahoo! did much the same, and, like Lavabit, did much of the fighting in secret. Well, except for the "shutting down" part -- although I think you can defensibly argue that the harm to privacy done by Yahoo! effectively sending its users to other random webmail services would be worse than the harm to privacy from keeping operating. Lavabit's users have more capability to fend for themselves or just stop using electronic communications.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com