But at the end of the day, even if FAANG help the government do a bad thing, it’s still the government doing a bad thing. Making FAANG the primary focus of our ire enables the government to continue to do those same bad things. And the bad things FAANG can do pale in comparison to what the government can and does do.
Again, it’s not a binary choice. But it’s why some people worry more about the government than large corporations.
To be clear, i agree it's not a binary choice and considerable amounts of bad things come out of governments too. Or if you like memes, you may enjoy: https://i.imgur.com/CkOr542.jpg
Corporations control the government.
The bad things that corporations do are much more immediate and common.
When a government does something bad, in practice it is often just failing to protect people from corporations. For example, the parent mentioned providing clean air and water; however, the most likely scenario where that doesn't happen is a corporation polluting the environment.
When the government does bad things (or more commonly fails to prevent bad things from happening), the consequences tend to correlate with inequality.
On the other hand, others see this power and want to use it. Thus recently we see a lot of "they are a private company, they can do whatever they want" when somebody likes how they handle some situation and "they have become too powerful, they need to be regulated" when somebody doesn't like that. This is a kind of a game where whoever makes facebook do their bidding wins, and facebook itself is reduced to maneuvering between various demands and interests without much agency of their own. That's quite scary as well.
My guess is this will end up with some kind of quasi-censorship regime, "voluntarily" installed by facebook (because, you know, first amendment), so that they can continue to collect their ad dollars unmolested. The beginnings are already there - various fact-checkers etc.
It's basically the same argument that the people making tools available have no responsibility for what users do with them (which is BS). The tools of misinformation are out there and being widely used and Facebook made them available. It's important that they take responsibility for that.
Indeed how did nation states get their legitimacy? They took it by force and impose it by force on those who disagree.
There is nothing natural or immutable about our current power structures or nation states.
I agree corporations don’t claim certain rights that governments do at present - the right to kill citizens (sometimes without trial), the right to tax their income (though they do impose transaction taxes). So they are limited at present but not so much as you imply.
Information is powerful and exerts huge control over our lives.