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?
Shit it’s worse than that. They broke the cooperative so owners like me got no consideration in the deal. The groundwork had been laid for years - slowly freezing enthusiasts out of the board in favour of people with retail experience. The next phase was changing product mix to increase sale volumes over the best equipment for your sport.
I noticed it several years ago when I went to talk about paddles and the kid there said he hadn’t been trained on that area yet. And I was like “trained? Don’t you paddle?” And the kid said he’d bought a bike after he started working there but didn’t really have a sport.