I think it’s broader than that: the entire U.S. tech industry has broad global influence due to our past reputation as a mostly-democratic, law-abiding country. Now everyone has to ask what Microsoft, Google, AWS, Red Hat, etc. would do to avoid risking their government contracts or possible consequences for their executives. Even in the open source world we have the Jia Tan example as something which must be in everyone’s threat model.
> Now everyone has to ask what Microsoft, Google, AWS, Red Hat, etc. would do to avoid risking their government contracts or possible consequences for their executives
As long as executive compensation is tied to stock performance, coorperations will only care about their stock price and the kinds of things that will affect it. I do not trust them regardless of who is in the White House. Their alignment of values/incentives is diametrically opposed to mine...
I’m not saying you should ever trust them completely but as UIP and the attacks on major law firms show we are now in a new, mob boss-like era where unambiguously illegal demands are not hypothetical. The threats we used to talk about were things like national security letters, which for all of their faults were at least a legal process administered by people who had some boundaries.
