This is so awesome. It's like I'm living in near future cyberpunk novel. With vigilante hacker groups fighting the evil and oppressive corpora^H^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment.
I was just thinking about Google v. China and PayPal v. India.
This kind of stuff is not necessarily new: think of the banana republics, the royal charter companies, Hearst and the Spanish-American War, and so on. Heck, the Boston Tea Party is comparable: a trollish, grandstanding intervention in government business.
What seems new is just how open it is: that Google, for example, appeals directly to the public when it argues with China. A hundred years ago, similar things might have happened, but I think only a few thousand people would have had such a clear view as everyone who reads a general-interest news site does now. It’s a lot harder to idealize power plays with our post-Watergate (if that’s the line) popular love of reliable muckraking.
"Chaos, Mr. Who," Lupus Yonderboy said. "That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick."
Or, in the parlance of our times, they do it for the lulz.