Utilities Governed Like Empires
After decades of hype, it’s only natural for your eyes to skate over corporate mission-statements without stopping to take note of them, but when it comes to ending your relationship with them, tech giants’ stated goals take on a sinister cast.
Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” ( Facebook ), “organizing the world’s information” ( Google ), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” ( Amazon ) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” ( Apple ), the founding missions of tech giants reveal a desire to become indispensable to our digital lives.
They’ve succeeded. We’ve entrusted these companies with our sensitive data, from family photos to finances to correspondence. We’ve let them take over our communities, from medical and bereavement support groups to little league and service organization forums. We’ve bought trillions of dollars’ worth of media from them, locked in proprietary formats that can’t be played back without their ongoing cooperation.
These services often work great...but they fail very, very badly. Tech giants can run servers to support hundreds of millions or billions of users - but they either can’t or won’t create equally user-centric procedures for suspending or terminating those users.
