I think people don't tend to realise how authoritarian the internal structures of companies are.

They're effectively miniature dictatorships. Normalising removing services because a tenant does something you personally find disagreeable is fine in the moment, but what happens when it's someone you support? Like when they removed Office365 access for a member of the EU parliament.[0]

For me, this is more proof (not less) that I shouldn't rely on US tech giants. Not because I will be collecting data on a population to do god-knows-what with, but because someone believes themselves to be the moral authority on what the compute I rent should be doing and that moral authority can be outraged for the whims of someone completely random, for any reason.

[0]: https://www.aurasalla.eu/en/2025/05/26/mep-aura-salla-micros...

>They're effectively miniature dictatorships. Normalising removing services because a tenant does something you personally find disagreeable is fine in the moment, but what happens when it's someone you support? Like when they removed Office365 access for a member of the EU parliament.

Not that I necessarily agree with what they did here, but I would like to point out that one alternative which has been employed previously would be to silently forward her e-mails to the NSA or state department. Refusing to offer their services is probably the most ethical thing that MS has ever done on behalf of the US federal government.

> is fine in the moment, but what happens when it's someone you support?

That's why I never find it "fine." It's only a matter of time before corporate power finds it's way to your hobby horse. I thought part of the "hacker vibe" was being highly suspicious of any form of authority.

I expect this to continue to be the conflict of responsibility and capability in the 21st century.

Alfred Nobel was known as a "merchant of death" for enabling the use of combat explosives that could do (by the standards of the time) preposterous damage to people, but his argument was that he just sold the dynamite; he wasn't responsible for the anarchists getting it and bombing something twice a week in New York. And even then, his conscience weighed on him enough that he endowed a Peace Prize when he died.

The story is different when the data conversion is being done on machines you own, in buildings you own, in a company you own (for practical reasons in addition to moral / theoretical; if someone wants to stop those computations, they're now going after your stuff, not trying to stop a supply-chain).