[jmstout]

What if it's the other way around? What if the smart and passionate folks at Facebook really do just want to get the internet to the rest of the world, and this is the way they can justify doing so?

They are a public company, after all. They have to fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, or at least appear to do so...

[kunai]

The fact that going public always tends to make a company's contributions to society less altruistic and turn the ethos of the company into "moar profitz foar de shaerhoaldurs" raises some fairly damning questions about our capital system and its tendency towards greed and stagnation.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Is this really the fault of the financial system? In some respects I believe 'economics' is a verb, so the fault -if there is any- lies with the agents enacting the verb, that is to say: people. Humans, groups of them even, certainly have a tendency to produce and accumulate all sorts of things being their survival needs and go on to trade them. This raises all sorts of concerns and has cause many a lot of stress.

Blaming 'capital' seems fairly erroneous. Deirdre Mccloskey, in her book 'Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World' has a very convincing go at turning the idea into a fallacy. The accumulation and use of capital isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. How much good has come from our desire to pool resources.

Also, it seems to me we tend to forget what the word 'corporation' means, literally "any group of persons united or regarded as united in one body". Certainly the other more obvious definition of the word includes that thing about "having a continuous existence independent of the existences of its members", though me must remember that the words "an association of individuals, created by law or under authority of law" come immediately prior. If people lose faith in a "company" it will rapidly cease to exist, or at the very lease must drastically change in order to continue.

And yes, I acknowledge we are, probably to a greater extend than we typically realise, products of our environment, products of the societal structures, and built environs, we find ourselves in, and that this makes it very messy to try to discern cause and effect, and to apportion blame. I guess I'm just sceptical of apportioning blame, I don't believe it's particularly helpful.

Maybe this comment is a bit incoherent. I often find myself writing comments then not posting them because I can't seem to make a point without contradicting, or undermining, my own writing.

Maybe my point is that things probably aren't as simple, as clear cut, as we think. Maybe that's why some people study the liberal arts and sciences and go on to write entire volumes on these sorts of topics.

[kunai]

I don't think anyone's saying that capitalism is directly at fault. Theoretically, a fully free market (assuming that companies always have consumer and shareholder interests at heart) should be optimal, encouraging healthy competition, choice for the consumer, and the economic freedom to found your own startup. Unfortunately, the realities of the free market encourage economic foundationalism and excessive bureaucracy. Despite the free market's relative strengths when looked at from purely a business and consumer perspective, the fastest way to earn revenue and (eventually) break even is to have a company playbook which encourages business decisions that are completely antithetical to what you'd expect from a free market company. After the inevitable IPO, they slowly tend towards maximizing shareholder profit in place of ensuring consumer satisfaction (there are exceptions to this rule-- Apple and Tesla are good examples), and the results are more acquisitions, more profiteering, more tax avoidance, and more focus on the bottom line than putting out a good product. Particularly harmful is how an unregulated free market encourages trusts and oligarchies -- the latter of which we still can't solve today with legislation alone.

For every airbnb or Facebook there are a thousand of acquired startups who kept thinking short-term and forgot entirely about long-term. Which is a shame, because I've no doubt that many put out a quality product -- and I've also no doubt that the company which acquired them may very well have killed said company's specific product two seconds after filling out all of the paperwork. See Google's numerous acquisitions for proof of this.

[Zelphyr]

They have to fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders

And those shareholders get priority over EVERYONE else in the chain. What the investors want, the investors get.

[adventured]

In the case of Facebook, no they do not.

First, that's a myth. There is no legal fiduciary responsibility to shareholders beyond the basics required by the SEC (which does not cover anything to do with maximizing profits et al).

Second, Zuckerberg controls Facebook. He has less realistic responsibility to the shareholders than almost any other CEO of a big public corporation in US history. The dual class share structure ensures he is able to ignore shareholder concerns and pressure that most other CEOs simply cannot.

[dingaling]

> They have to fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, or at least appear to do so...

Actually they could completely ignore their shareholders from this point forward and absolutely nothing would happen to Facebook the company.

They have their IPO money in their pockets and the daily ebb-and-flow of Facebook share-trading provides no benefit to them other than reputation-enhancement should they wish to go to the markets again in the future.