If I was the Frightful Five & I wanted to make sure that all the gov'ts in the world continue to pay me monopoly rents in perpetuity, what I'd do is to encourage some of my most evilly competent execs in each national office to resign & apply for influential decision making roles within all that country's gov't (I'd keep paying them, too, of course, but untracably) to ensure that the gov't *increased* its procurement of my megacorp's proprietary tech. I'm fairly certain this is common practice.
Tech’s Frightful Five: They’ve Got Us

Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google dominate our day-to-day activities. Imagining being forced to give up some of them could lead to hard choices.

The New York Times
@lightweight It's disturbing that the #FrightfulFive excludes #Cloudflare. It's easy to give up Apple & Google compared to CF. A boycott on CF would mean giving up the right to vote for Americans in 10% of the country. How many other tech giants stand in the way of something as basic and essential as voting in elections?
@resist1984 I'm no fan of Cloudflare either... but how do they stand in the way of Americans voting? Are there states so mind numbingly stupid that they have online voting?
@lightweight there are US states where the state secretary collects voter reg. applications using a #Cloudflare site: AZ,GA,HI,ID,NY,OH,RI,WA (so 16% actually). If Cloudflare blocks them, they can still register on paper but the person doing the data entry likely does so on the very same website that's Cloudflared, so even your paper registration details would be shared with Cloudflare.
@lightweight there are a dozen or so 3rd party sites that people can register through like Headstart, but many of those are also Cloudflared.. and even the ones that aren't, it's likely the same issue.. to get into the state's db it would have to go through the state's own Cloudflare site.