The lobbyists you mentioned, for example, aren’t like mosquitoes which just show up in DC — companies and industry groups hire them to make sure members of Congress hear their preferences. Some are hired by tech companies, others by their opponents or special interest groups. The tech companies have a ton of money and an enviable reputation as one of the best growth industries for the future so they’ve been very successful at preventing or defanging regulation. That doesn’t mean that people don’t know what’s going on – more commonly, they don’t think it’s a problem, know they don’t have the votes, or have other priorities.

Agreed, and one of the reasons for the failure of policy is the millions of dollars spent by companies like Google and Facebook in lobbying and spreading FUD among politicians and the GP alike.

That said, eventually some remedial laws will have to filter through, as you cannot keep sweeping shit under the carpet and ignoring it forever.

However, that's when the real problems of policing new laws begin, as the long and tortured history of trying to get corporations to comply with laws repeatedly attests. Cigarette companies deliberately lying and obfuscating the truth about the dangers of cigarettes for decades is a quintessential example.

The only surefire way of resolving this is to simultaneously legislate that company employees are equally liable under the law for a company's violations of the law. This would mean that employees would be in violation of the law if they engaged in or formulated company policies that violated the law or if they learned about such violations and did nothing about them.

In essence, as employees could no longer hide behind corporate structures, self preservation would kick in and to save themselves from possible prosecution they would make the company's wrongdoing public. (There is little doubt that this would be very effective law if penalties were high enough.)

The fact that laws aren't already properly framed in this way shows how successful corporate influence has been on government policy up until now.

If citizens feel sufficiently strongly about this then they'll be politically motivated to do something about it. Personally, I find it very odd that there hasn't been a general call from the citizenry along these lines long ago.

The fact that all past blustering about corporate misbehavior has amounted to essentially nothing and that there has been no change of any significe along these lines to remedy matters tells me that either the general public doesn't really care sufficiently about the issue and or that too many people own shares in corpations and thus have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Are you talking about the DOJ and many state governments run by people that received donations and support from Google and Facebook?

Let me know when a politician bites the hand that fed them.

So the story isn't quite complete without mentioning: It's mostly the Republican party that has stopped acting in ways that could be considered good for the country. It's gotten so bad they are actively trying to undermine democracy in every imaginable way, including opposing any constraints on campaign donations and even the regular application of the few safeguards left after Citizen United.

Are you suggesting we use their distribution networks to move crack in to the cities, then use the money made to fund illegal interventions in South America?

Seems a bit extreme, i'd say just break them up.

"Michael Cuesta’s movie 'Kill the Messenger' tells the story of Gary Webb, whose August 1996 investigative series “Dark Alliance,” published in the San Jose Mercury News, uncovered ties between the Central Intelligence Agency and massive drug peddling by the right-wing, mercenary Nicaraguan Contras. Webb’s three-part series established that in the 1980s the CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the US that was widely distributed as crack. The drug profits were then funneled by the CIA to the Contras in their war against the left-nationalist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/17/kill-o17.html

The CIA meet all of their own criteria to be a terrorist organisation.

When did so many on Hacker News become so pathetically fatalistic? I expect this from spoiled teenagers, not hackers of all people.

Alright, lads, we can't rely on the government for this one, how are we going to do it?

Ownership aside isn’t big tech something of an expert workers council?

If there’s literal logistics value to these systems we’ll build them anyway.

Political labels like cartel help politicians sell us on big ownership.

Let’s do novel things literally and ditch figurative political tradition. No more political tradition, no more big corp.

Obviously it can’t happen over night. We could invoke old politics or let big tech takeover the world and let workers takeover big tech as they forget about politics

Sorry, but who are you to speak for the entire world? You may not like facebook and google personally, but it is far streach to think you know to represent one country let alone the whole world.

For one thing, your are not speaking for myself: both google and facebook are some of the best tech I enjoy using every day, and they have and are improving mylife daily. They did not violate my trust in any way.

And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it? Even out of respect for the community, so here supporting material not just words, in the air is what appreciated the most.

What I don't understand, is how a tendentious hateful post is not downvotes here on HN?

> And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it?

Read any of the half dozen articles on the front page this morning detailing google’s behavior. Or the links in TFA.

> What I don't understand, is how a tendentious hateful post is not downvotes here on HN?

Turns out that person does speak for a whole lot of people.

So why then speak for the "entire world"? It would be much better phrased if some one wrote: "*in my opinion* the entire world is ... ", even this small addition of "in my opinion" makes for a much more serious discourse, I believe.

From my personal experience, when I check a random sample of some of the accusations against facebook, then they all seem to be a misrepresentation of facebook...

For the last part, I don't think HN is anywhere repesenatative of even the opinion of US, let alone the whole world. So not sure why you decide to mention that a lot of people on HN might agree with the op, what does it contribute to the discussion?

Actually, yes. The reason this is news is because it was recently unredacted from internal Google documents submited to the court:

https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1451579045246820355?s=...

There has been plenty of proof of illegal (downright malicious) behavior in multiple dimension by big tech (anti competitive, anti privacy, bad security practices, keeping wages low, lying in front of congress, inciting (or at least turning a blind eye on) war, genocide and riots, the list goes on...) and new revelations like these here are showing up nearly daily. Especially in the ad industry incentives are not aligned.

The problem is that fines (which is proof of their illegal actions, since you asked for proof) are always very low - so companies design their actions with that in mind.

Maybe it's an indication that you are so impartial that you equate facebook with drug dealer?