The CEO praised one of Trump's picks for an attorney overseeing internet regulation and then when asked about it, the official Proton account replied with multiple posts about how Democrats were sold out to big business and Republicans were the party of small business. Also about how J.D. Vance was the only person to want to talk to Proton about internet regulation. It's worth noting they also left out that the attorney in question lobbied for multiple big tech companies before being appointed and Proton's whole argument was "democrats are captured by big tech".
Then when further asked about it, the CEO essentially said he didn't actually know much about the situation and hadn't meant it as an endorsement despite the original posts essentially being a one-sided attack on Democrats and all praise for the current administration, including @ mentioning Donald Trump. He also kept saying "my comments from last year" when they were from December and the controversy was in Jan.
At best it seems quite naive from Proton's side to think the administration where Musk, Zuckerberg, and Cook were front row at the inauguration, and was generally funded by Musk, Thiel, Bezos and a raft of other VC folks is going to be more aggressive at regulating big tech companies and for internet privacy in general. At worst, they're trying to curry favor with/actually in favor of the current administration and don't want to admit it because a lot of their value as a business is for people who don't want the government to see their data.
Early on, the CEO, owner, of proton, ran a self published glam campain for himself,company, and family.So it's easy to see him attempt to do a little , heh heh ;), social mountain climbing.
And as a user (less and less) of proton,it's been a slog,with technical problems on an android phone, impossible to resolve, years, multiple different phones, browsers....it's on there end, and there technical support , engages, but does nothing.
And the pokbun does not load.
Having personal/business web space with domain email is reasonable, and the lowest tier prices are very cost effective,simple to use, with clutter free, intuitive UI.
Having a domain free's up any possible liability
from switching service or hardware providers and also means that anything you build, or pay to have built is your own intellectual property.Tech support tends to be good, as long as the problems
are actualy technical, and you can provide relevant details, but the learning curve is steep, and nothing is intuitive on the back end, though it's worth it all, for the " IT WORKED!!, Heeeeeyyyyyy! I'm soooo Cool! " moment.
That's really the core of it for me. Literally no one was asking for or expecting his input on the appointment of an assistant attorney at the US DoJ. Trump probably doesn't even know who this is or what their job is. The fact that Proton's CEO decided to talk about it is most of the attention this appointment even got.
Even outside of me thinking it was a poorly thought out endorsement, it's just so amazingly unnecessary. I follow journalists and activists around anti-trust and internet regulation and I literally hadn't heard about this appointment.
Throughout, he doesn't really give any actual justification for why he thought the original post was correct or remotely well informed. I haven't seen anything from him that acknowledges that he's praising an ex-lobbyist as being good for antitrust, or any explanation of why he'd think it was actually a good appointment for his asserted values. The only stated reasoning was "democrats bad, republicans good". There's no discussion of the role Musk and Thiel and Bezos played in electing Trump. There's no discussion of any Biden-era anti-trust action and why he'd think Trump's folks would do more.
It's hard for me to come away from it with a positive opinion of the CEO's decision making and judgement.
I may have missed it in the thread, but I didn't really ever see an argument. Just a "I trust the republicans and their pick". There was no deeper discussion or assertion of why this was a good pick. All of the followup was about how he disliked the democrats and liked Vance.
That's not really a solid argument to me. No part of the original post or the followup helps me understand why he thinks a former lobbyist for Amazon and Google would be for anti-trust action against them.
Most of the responses on reddit, while overblown, are generally pointing out that most of big tech was funding Trump and Vance's election. If most of the CEO's argument is how much the democrats are in the pocket of big tech, that seems quite relevant. A pretty substantial percentage of the money spent to elect Trump was from Musk and other VC folks, and Bezos notably killed an endorsement of Harris at the newspaper he ran.
As someone said in the thread, it feels like the CEO took a "the enemy of my enemy must be better" in this, when it's entirely correct that both US parties are in the pocket of corporate interests. He's not wrong about the Democrats, but that definitely doesn't mean Trump's appointments are better. He could have just decided to sit this out and say nothing, which makes it all the more objectionable that he decided this was his time to show up and publicly try to get Trump's attention to praise him. As far as I know he wasn't @ mentioning Biden to praise the various anti-trust actions that were taken over the last few years.
He wrote, she has a good track record. Which is true.
> My post is talking about Gail Slater, who is by all measures, actually a good pick, with a solid track record of being on the right side of the antitrust issue. Yes, she happens to be nominated by Trump, but her record speaks for itself.
And just looking at where proton puts its mouth and money, it’s obvious they cannot be MAGA, it just does not fit at all. They commit 10% of their benefit to Ukraine, as an example.
Hence, the post was out of touch a bit, badly formulated, but that’s it. Hence could indeed have simple said nothing, I agree.
I mean, maybe, but as folks in the comments pointed out, she literally lobbied on behalf of Amazon and others against regulation on big tech companies. She worked against a number of EFF efforts, for instance.
To be clear, I don't think this is some hidden effort to secretly support Trump, but it's such an obviously bad move that was then defended that makes it hard to understand what he was possibly thinking.
If he'd been deep in the comments talking about how he personally knew this lawyer and laying out why he was convinced she was a good pick, then maybe. But outside of him saying "solid track record", I don't think I saw any actual articulation of the record he's saying she had, and plenty of people calling out the things she did that were as pro-Big Tech as Chuck Schumer's daughters that he called out as marking the decline of his support for democrats.
Which is the additional part of this being horrible judgement. If it was just "This person is someone I think is good" then sure. Maybe he's wrong, but it's a defensible position. Publishing a detailed explanation of why he's disowning an entire political party that had literally just had Lina Kahn doing some of the most aggressive anti-trust prosecutions in decades is wild. There's a space to just cheer for people doing things well that your organization agrees with, but he chose to issue statements condemning entire parties and praising others by name.
It's just American political posturing and cancel culture. It's really annoying how pervasive black-and-white thinking is now in American political discourse that you cannot even say one good or bad thing about some American politician or policy, without every American jumping on you like you have a chosen a side you should be ready to die for!
The spillover of American politics to the internet is the saddest thing I've encountered online as a non-American because they are trying to force us into right- and left- echo chambers they've created to make us think about politics like them.
I'm not an American and I don't want to trust my email to a company that supports a government that is threatening to annex my country.
This isn't culture war stuff it's just common sense. I didn't fall for some us vs them trap, the current US government is frequently and loudly telling me that it's me vs them.
Like I said, black-and-white thinking - some company CEO supporting some particular public policy of an administration doesn't make them a part of "their" camp and hence your "enemy". I support the end of the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, and am happy that Trump as the US President wants to do so too (for his own political reasons, and in his own idiotic political ways). That doesn't make me a Trump MAGA fan or a right-wing supporter of the Republican.
I agree totally with you that it is black and white thinking -- either you're with us or you're against us.
Canada's sovereignty is not up for debate and we will not support a country that threatens us.
This means that we're not going to be buying nearly as many American goods, not going to be visiting America for tourism and not suffering the fools that you call politicians and diplomats.
As far as the average Canadian is concerned America can twist in the wind. The feelings of betrayal are real and won't be going away any time soon.
The world is tired of the inane histrionics and is moving on from America.
Define the controversy and their leanings