/liberty/ - Liberty

Google is an arm of the State. C.f., DARPA, DLI, etc..

>>102665 (OP)

>Google is a free-market company

That's where you're wrong. Google is for all intents and purposes a CIA slush fund, they are a de facto branch of the government and should be treated as such.

> If I continue to use Firefox, Protonmail, etc., am I really a free-market advocate anymore?

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. How is making your own decisions prevent you from being a free market advocate? A key point of economics is the subjective theory of value–just because Google is the most "efficient" doesn't mean it meets your own subjective preferences. What is most "efficient" for you is to select products which best meet your preferences, and if alternative webservices do that, you're not violating some nonexistent tenet of libertarian doctrine if you seek out those preferences.

Also, Firefox hasn't been a privacy-centered browser for quite a while, not to mention being staffed by insufferable virtue-signalers. You're better off using Palemoon or something similar if you're paranoid about people tracking you.

>>102682

is walmart arm of the state too?

>>102734

Anyone that receives government money is, in one form or another

>>102744

Now this is just fucking stupid.

Walmart may benefit from subsidies, preferential treatment and socialise a bunch of it's costs but isn't an extension of the intelligence apparatus and a integral part of US geostrategy like Google, Facebook or Twitter are.

>>102734

No, not to the extent the tech companies are. They'll still take actions they wouldn't have made otherwise (e.g., shilling for pride month) in exchange for regulatory favoritism or kickbacks. But that doesn't make them a puppet of the deep state.

>>102747

They may not be an "arm of the state" as much as unwitting (?) pawns, but as long as you receive subsidies you automatically have an advantage over the competition which you wouldn't have without the state, thus distorting the market. Those fuckhuge corporations can't exist without the state after all.

>>102710

>Google is for all intents and purposes a CIA slush fund, they are a de facto branch of the government and should be treated as such.

I hear claims like these thrown around over Amazon, Google, Microshaft, etc. Is there substantial information to back this up, that they are a branch of the government, beyond just subsidies? For the record I do believe these claims, I just want to see them backed up

>>102773

Use your favorite search engine of choice to back up what I'm about to say.

- The U.S. government has a precedent of bribing or blackmailing certain outlets to do this sort of thing (COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird).

- DLI and MDDS were projects used by DARPA to seed Google.

- LifeLog, a DARPA project whose application and goals nearly identically match Facebook's–ended the day Facebook started.

- In-Q-Tel (a CIA "consultant") sponsored a bunch of projects to keep big tech happy. I would seriously look into In-Q-Tel if I were you. Some notable ones:

- - Keyhole (which later became Google Earth)

- - A lot of language translation software (although, that news is >20 years old, so likely that became Google Translate)

- - Cleversafe (a child company of IBM)

- - Cloudera, which in turn formed partnerships with Oracle, Intel, Microsoft, etc., etc..

- The CIA has paid Amazon at least half a billion in Amazon webservices, but in reality nearly all of the government pays Amazon massively (search for "Secret Region").

Seriously, if you type in "{Corporate big tech entity} {NSA/CIA/FBI/etc.} {contract/deal/seed funding/etc.}" into a search engine, you can find loads of stories about this stuff.

>>102773

Here's an article that's split into two parts. While the author is a lefty I think but he does his research and explains the history very well.

>>102781

Fuck I forgot the article. Sorry about that.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

>>102782

would it be better for us if usa did not use private intelligence companies? private is more efficient than public i think…

>>102911

It would be better for us if the USA didn't use anything at all, or had the power to use anything at all.

>>102911

I don't want the intelligence agency to be efficient at what it does, so yes, it would be.

>>102744

Every business and person “receives” government money, dumbass. The question to determine if something is part of the state is only if it would be insolvent without government support (or is complicit in the state’s major crimes). Carnegie Steel benefited from tariffs, but it was so hugely successful that it would hardly have mattered if it had them or not.

>>102912

well i agree

Gonna repeat what already has been said.

Internet couldn't exist in a free market, the infrastructures are there thanks to the State. There is nothing wrong with that, not everything should exist, and maybe internet shouldn't exist in the first place.

Then, on top of this, Google, Facebook, etc got a lot of money and legal privileges, of course they get almost a monopoly on tech.

So you have companies that dominate thanks to the State on an infrastructure created by States.

>>102953

>only the state can create infrastructure

Literally a muh roads argument