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873 points helsinkiandrew | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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dijit ◴[] No.45376462[source]
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...

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1. snickerbockers ◴[] No.45379798[source]
>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.