Asklemmy

43889 readers

775 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

What is the biggest corporate heel turn that you know? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by DrBob@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was thinking about this after listening to Marc Andreassen blather on about how he doesn't trust government as a repository of trusted keys and other functions. He advocates for private companies to perform critical functions. Standard libertarian stuff in many respects.

The problem of course is that corporations lack accountability. They can shift terms and conditions or corporate purpose and there is little meaningful recourse except to stop using them. I can think of small examples that don't widely resonate (Mountain Equipment Co-op I'm thinking of you 🤬) but are there big examples that I'm missing?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The accountability is both legal and electoral. Neither is necessarily easy, but this is dramatically different than the legal framework that applies to corporations.

I don't want to clog up the thread with examples, but you don't need to search too hard to find examples of minor harms that aren't worth any individuals time to sue.

Class actions are supposed to be the antidote but wind up enriching the filing lawyers and the named plaintiff. Everyone else gets a coupon for $1.27 off their next purchase.

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Here's one I just ran across shortly after writing this.

Booz Allen is a private company that runs recreation.gov and sets it's own fees to pay itself.

Somebody sued and won saying that fees charged for access to national parks were meant only for park maintenance and therefore the fees were illegal. They won! And then...nothing.

Technically everyone who paid a booking fee to access an American National park in the last decade is entitled to a refund. Not a penny appears to be forthcoming because fuck you, that's why.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back