a) Twitter's job is to make money; carrying your latest 140-char call to arms 'normally' helps, but if in some circumstance it doesn't, they won't
b) Corporations (and actually, at the end of the day, all capitalist enterprises) are by definition reliant on the state, so you would expect them to compromise when the merde hits the fan.
So, colour me unsurprised. Yes, in theory I would like Twitter to stand up to oppressive state regimes. My political beliefs are as they are, in part, because I know they won't.
Corporations are under no such compulsion. Their sole motive is profit. Put Wal-Mart in charge, and they'll happily kill half the population and feed them to the other half if the accountants say it will cut costs somehow. Yeah, every now and then you get someone with a conscience in charge of a big company, but if you're going to rely on that you might as well just cut out the middleman and go straight to a "benevolent" dictatorship.
Oh, the other thing you missed is that most corpocracy scenarios (including the one that we're actually living in) aren't about corporations standing up to the government, but about them using money and influence to make sure that the government does what's best for the corps instead of what's best for the people. Giving the corps more power doesn't create a balance, it just makes it easier for them to pull the puppet strings.
On a related note, if we look at corporations as nations with citizens being their employees, then actually they work in a more similar way to a government - they usually provide healthcare, define certain laws (as in, rules and dependencies within the corporation itself) and seek to make their employees happy (or else employees will go to other company). And additionally people don't get so zealously protective about their corporations as they do about nations, so maybe rather than waging wars they would choose to simply change the corporation they are in.
Well, I certainly don't say we should make a change in this direction though; it's simply a thought I find interesting, how corporations provide to their employees some of the things similarly as the government does (and sometimes provide even though the government should, but doesn't).
Please review the history of the various "East India" companies. I think you will find it an enlightening read.
I have, actually. What's interesting to me is that it really points out the inherent paradox, in that corporations (as we know them today anyway) actually owe their existence to the State. With the East India Company it was a Royal Charter.
Note that I'm just playing "Devil's Advocate" here to some extent. I'm not necessarily a fan of super-huge corporations with Nation-State level power. In fact, I'm not necessarily a fan of any entity having "Nation-State level power", including Nation-States! :-)
Again, I'm not arguing for corporations like that. I'm just interested in the discussion vis-a-vis how power can/should/might be organized and controlled.
All of the dominant American online service already come with their own built-in ideological censorship, usually under the euphemism "family-friendly". (Twitter is actually one of the most tolerant services.)
People can challenge the governments of their own countries quite well, thankyouverymuch. It may take time, but in the end they are a big fat easy target.
Challenging global corporations is a lot more terrifying. So far the only thing that has helped us fight back has been... governments.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-s-korea-the-republic-...
Reminds me of the ludicrous scenario for Deus Ex Human Revolution. Nation States (at least in developed countries) are concentrating far more power than most multinational companies anyway, so I'd say anything that puts some balance of power is probably a good thing.
Rather than having indirect power that can be stolen, people need direct local power that has consequences with transparent effects.
Big nations, and corporations, we allow them to exist, and some of us, sometimes myself, think they are good for us. It just makes me sad how passive and accepting we are in this regard, and how current culture enables small companies quickly rise to into position to serve yet another brand of Soma.
Corporations are entities who owe their existence to government and can be terminated at a whim by government. If the government chartering a corporation decides it shouldn't continue to exist, it doesn't exist anymore.
This gets obscured a lot by the fact that the same class of people that derive the most benefit from the existence of corporations also have disproportionate power over government, so that this power is very rarely exercised, but that's not because corporations are powerful enough to resist government or even theoretically could be, its because corporations and governments ultimately are run by the same people.
Yeah that's the way it works today and in Real Life. Clearly the cyberpunk scenario is a hypothetical, but it might not be as far-fetched as it seems.
Whether it's a Good Idea or not is, obviously a big question.
Yes, corporate charters have been revoked for failure to comply with legal requirements. AFAIK, the most recent period of time during which this (sometimes referred to as the "corporate death sentence") was an actively-pursued remedy for violations of the law in the US (though it is one on the books still in, I believe, all states) is the late 19th and early 20th century [1].
[1] Some New York cases discussed starting on p. 250 (of the source document, not the PDF) under "Revocations Based on Misuse of the Corporate Charter for Violations of State Law": http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
The problems start when governments and corporations merge.
In theory Twitter could bribe these governments, but that would be morally worse (and legally worse) than caving.
We should never expect corporations to take on the role of challenging the government. In "democracies", this is the role of the citizen (whose responsibility is to vote). Corporations, on the other hand, are controlled by people with lots of money whose goal it is to make even more money.
I don't see why we shouldn't expect corporations to take on the role of challenging the government. It is in Twitter's interest for governments not to crack down on free speech. So when governments do crack down, it is in their interest to stand up to those governments, especially when they don't have any employees or assets in those countries.
One worry would be that the Russian government could threaten Twitter with cyberattacks.
Article shows otherwise, it is not in Twitter's interest to worsen relationships with any government by refusing to comply with requests. Providing some evidence would be helpful.
But in this case, what we see is a situation where we'd like to see Twitter stand up to various world governments... perhaps even the US government. But we all know that, in the end, there's a limit to how much they can contest the will of the government because the governments are the ones with "men with guns".
Maybe companies / corporations with enough power to actually challenge the governments of the world isn't such a bad thing after all. Or, perhaps it would be better to say "maybe corporations with enough power to challenge the governments of the world" is, at least, not a universally bad thing.