Dave Lane 
🇳🇿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.
if you're not sure who the "Frightful Five" are: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/technology/techs-frightful-five-theyve-got-us.html
resist1984@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.
@resist1984 well, yes, that's messed up. It suggests the level of tech ignorance that I see throughout gov'ts world wide is at play there, too... which is why I characterise our current state of affairs as being in the midst of a Digital Dark Age: https://davelane.nz/darkage
@lightweight I think they are more commonly referred to as the "big 5" or #GAFAM, but I find it short-sighted because Cloudflare has a serious awareness problem. It has taken control of roughly 1/3rd of websites worldwide, and probably 99% of the world's population has no idea & have never heard the name. It's important to put CF in the mud with the others to increase awareness.
@lightweight I use #MACFANG to do that.. or even #MACFANGY if I need to include Verizon-Yahoo in some cases.
@resist1984 my main reason for using #FrightfulFive is that there's a handy article which explains it and why they're frightful in a (relatively) credible neatly packaged (if sorta-paywalled) form. It's an imperfect label for a despicable group.
@lightweight When I tell my banker or insurance agent "no, i will not email you because I can see that your email address is hosted by #Microsoft (or Google)", they are usually immediately understanding. Even if they don't hold that position themselves, most of the public has been made aware of the controversy & I often need not explain further.
@resist1984 that's good to hear. Not a common understanding here in NZ. I usually get looks of total confusion when I suggest similar.