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Comment by kokanee

19 hours ago

Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't think we even fully understand.

My ranking from most evil to least would be:

1. Google

2. Meta

3. Microsoft

4. Amazon

5. Apple

6. Netflix

21 comments

kokanee

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johannes1234321  19 hours ago

Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta. While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler)

  • cess11  6 hours ago

    Project Nimbus is Amazon and Google together. Meta was early on the genocidal train, in e.g. Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as adjacent to the 'regime change' obsession of usian elites.

    Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights.

bratsche  17 hours ago

I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something.

I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?

  • terminalshort  17 hours ago

    Nothing fundamentally changed. The only real difference is they hit that inevitable point for any business that they had to start making money. They weren't evil then and they aren't now. They're a business, and they are responding to market demand for free to consumer products paid for by advertisement. What nobody on HN wants to admit is that the vast majority of people would rather have that than pay for their software in dollars. People love to complain about the Google panopticon but aren't willing to grapple with the fact that it has tremendous benefits too.

    • skinkestek  13 hours ago

      They single-handedly dismantled a thriving browser ecosystem. They pushed Real Name policies, used Google+ to stifle innovation, and then finished the job by shutting Google+ down.

      And so on.

      1 reply →

  • geocar  12 hours ago

    > Google seemed so great in the beginning.

    It's almost like they were good at marketing.

techjamie  17 hours ago

Can we get an honorable mention for Adobe? I'd put Adobe probably right under Apple.

  • 20after4  12 hours ago

    Adobe would be far more evil if they weren't so bad at making software. I think their intentions and business practices are clearly equal to or more evil than Apple, they just don't have nearly the scale and market reach that Apple has.

timuckun  16 hours ago

Does google collect more information than Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Palantir etc?

I don't think so. Collecting data is a baseline for all those companies, you have to rank the evil they do with that data.

fc417fc802  12 hours ago

> they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more

Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform.

physix  16 hours ago

What's so evil about Netflix?

They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)

  • kaladin-jasnah  16 hours ago

    DRM is probably something that people take issue with, and it's probably harder to buy physical media that you "own" more than streaming services.