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?
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