[neilv]

When I've tried to get a customer of CloudFlare to fix a consistent block of their site -- not safety-critical, but mission-critical, and costing them a SaaS sale -- nobody seemed to care.

My impression is that everyone knows that Cloudflare is blocking some legitimate people, but nobody -- neither the customer, nor Cloudflare -- cares enough to solve that problem.

It's similar to why Google doesn't have much tech support. Or why people can be locked out of their Google or Apple accounts without recourse. Caring about the people who fall through the cracks that you created isn't profitable.

When the Internet is part of the basic material of society, we need to rediscover ideals like "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".

And we need to start removing from power the entities who are too lazy or greedy to uphold our ideals.

(Before someone jumps on literal numbers: That doesn't mean let through 10 botnet floods, rather than prevent grandma from finding a doctor. That could just mean, for example, don't block grandma because one of her browser headers looks suspiciously like an incompetent script kiddie, even though you can see that her traffic isn't yet part of a DDoS flood. Once you change the parameters to be more consistent with a fair and just society, maybe that means that, say, a Web site's servers do see a brief blip, as a new DDoS attack spins up, so it's not a perfectly smooth ride, but every legitimate person remains served. First, don't run over grandma; apply your engineering creativity with that hard requirement in mind.)

[globie]

Do you ever find that advocating for these tenets feels "weird" nowadays? As in, don't you know these publicly traded companies are legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust? What do you expect them to do? To start acting silly?

[maeil]

> As in, don't you know these publicly traded companies are legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust?

Based on your first question, I think you might already know this, but just in case you don't: This is a myth.

> The idea that choosing a 1% strategic internal investment over a 4.5% T-bill constitutes actionable "financial malpractice" or a breach of fiduciary duty leading to successful lawsuits is incorrect. Courts recognize that running a business requires strategic choices and risk-taking, not just maximizing immediate, risk-free yield. A lawsuit would fail unless plaintiffs could show the decision was tainted by disloyalty, bad faith, or gross negligence in the decision-making process, none of which are implied by simply choosing a lower-yield strategic project.

> Hence why no one ever gets sued for this. It doesn't happen. It lives in the minds of HNers and Redditors to provide a very convenient excuse for their employers, or in general companies, making abhorrent decisions purely based on feels and short-term next-quarter profits/stock price, regardless of the negative externalities they inflict on society.

[globie]

A "Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" means exactly what I said: "legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust".

The only notions of empathy or trust you see from publicly traded companies nowadays is the over-engineered calamity of ESG. If you have a single example of a moderately-adopted trend which demonstrates a genuine desire to do right by their society, or to build long-term trust at the expense of short-term profits, I'll readily adopt it into my world model.

[dragonwriter]

> A "Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" means exactly what I said: "legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust".

You can define the term that way, but then it doesn't apply to anything that actually exists. Firms do have enforceable legal obligations to their shareholders, but that isn't one of them.

(OTOH, for a widely-held publicly-traded firm, the set of incentives facing management will encourage much the same behvior that that mythical obligation would require, but the mechanism is entirely different.)

[maeil]

That entirely ignores the reality I displayed showing that such a thing does not exist by law in any meaningful way. Yes, the overwhelming majority of publicly held companies behaves this way. No, this is not because they're bound by any kind of law to do so, nor would they be at any legal risk if they were to behave differently.

[neilv]

I know that some corporations behave like they are jerks who are full of poo.

And some percentage of the rest will act like jerks once it's to their advantage.

But society still holds corporations to account on some societal values.

Mostly through legislation. But sometimes through consumers (and B2B) voting with their pocketbooks.