Then when further asked about it, the CEO essentially said he didn't actually know much about the situation and hadn't meant it as an endorsement despite the original posts essentially being a one-sided attack on Democrats and all praise for the current administration, including @ mentioning Donald Trump. He also kept saying "my comments from last year" when they were from December and the controversy was in Jan.

At best it seems quite naive from Proton's side to think the administration where Musk, Zuckerberg, and Cook were front row at the inauguration is going to be more agressive at regulating big tech companies and for internet privacy in general. At worst, they're trying to curry favor with/actually in favor of the current administration and don't want to admit it because a lot of their value as a business is for people who don't want the government to see their data.

please link source

Here's the archive. Do you really think I'd write up all of that just completely making it up?

Most of the rest of it is from a reddit thread here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_poli...

(And I profoundly despise Trump, he’s near the bottom of my scale when it comes to politicians)

That's not really a solid argument to me. No part of the original post or the followup helps me understand why he thinks a former lobbyist for Amazon and Google would be for anti-trust action against them.

Most of the responses on reddit, while overblown, are generally pointing out that most of big tech was funding Trump and Vance's election. If most of the CEO's argument is how much the democrats are in the pocket of big tech, that seems quite relevant. A pretty substantial percentage of the money spent to elect Trump was from Musk and other VC folks, and Bezos notably killed an endorsement of Harris at the newspaper he ran.

As someone said in the thread, it feels like the CEO took a "the enemy of my enemy must be better" in this, when it's entirely correct that both US parties are in the pocket of corporate interests. He's not wrong about the Democrats, but that definitely doesn't mean Trump's appointments are better. He could have just decided to sit this out and say nothing, which makes it all the more objectionable that he decided this was his time to show up and publicly try to get Trump's attention to praise him. As far as I know he wasn't @ mentioning Biden to praise the various anti-trust actions that were taken over the last few years.

> My post is talking about Gail Slater, who is by all measures, actually a good pick, with a solid track record of being on the right side of the antitrust issue. Yes, she happens to be nominated by Trump, but her record speaks for itself.

And just looking at where proton puts its mouth and money, it’s obvious they cannot be MAGA, it just does not fit at all. They commit 10% of their benefit to Ukraine, as an example.

Hence, the post was out of touch a bit, badly formulated, but that’s it. Hence could indeed have simple said nothing, I agree.

To be clear, I don't think this is some hidden effort to secretly support Trump, but it's such an obviously bad move that was then defended that makes it hard to understand what he was possibly thinking.

If he'd been deep in the comments talking about how he personally knew this lawyer and laying out why he was convinced she was a good pick, then maybe. But outside of him saying "solid track record", I don't think I saw any actual articulation of the record he's saying she had, and plenty of people calling out the things she did that were as pro-Big Tech as Chuck Schumer's daughters that he called out as marking the decline of his support for democrats.

Which is the additional part of this being horrible judgement. If it was just "This person is someone I think is good" then sure. Maybe he's wrong, but it's a defensible position. Publishing a detailed explanation of why he's disowning an entire political party that had literally just had Lina Kahn doing some of the most aggressive anti-trust prosecutions in decades is wild. There's a space to just cheer for people doing things well that your organization agrees with, but he chose to issue statements condemning entire parties and praising others by name.

Proton is a Swiss company why the fuck is the CEO glazing an american fascist. Time to look for alternatives.

And as a user (less and less) of proton,it's been a slog,with technical problems on an android phone, impossible to resolve, years, multiple different phones, browsers....it's on there end, and there technical support , engages, but does nothing. And the pokbun does not load.

i was thinking tuta.com but did not do proper research yet.

Even outside of me thinking it was a poorly thought out endorsement, it's just so amazingly unnecessary. I follow journalists and activists around anti-trust and internet regulation and I literally hadn't heard about this appointment.

The spillover of American politics to the internet is the saddest thing I've encountered online as a non-American because they are trying to force us into right- and left- echo chambers they've created to make us think about politics like them.

Please don't fall for this trap of "us vs them".

I'm not an American and I don't want to trust my email to a company that supports a government that is threatening to annex my country.

This isn't culture war stuff it's just common sense. I didn't fall for some us vs them trap, the current US government is frequently and loudly telling me that it's me vs them.

Canada's sovereignty is not up for debate and we will not support a country that threatens us.

This means that we're not going to be buying nearly as many American goods, not going to be visiting America for tourism and not suffering the fools that you call politicians and diplomats.

As far as the average Canadian is concerned America can twist in the wind. The feelings of betrayal are real and won't be going away any time soon.

The world is tired of the inane histrionics and is moving on from America.