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Yeah, honestly, I was about to start shifting a lot of my stuff to proton, and that episode made me do a complete about-face.

I am in no way, shape or form defending Trump? The man should be rotting away in a Federal prison not serving a second Presidential term, but that’s really outside the scope of what we are trying to discuss here at this very moment.

As the Republican Party began to hyper-radicalise during the Obama era, there was a marked shift in corporate spend from the GOP towards the Dems. That’s not to say that no such money is going towards the GOP at all, but they have more-and-more begun to rely on dark money via SuperPACs. That means that their stances will continue to skew towards the extreme, further alienating corporate donors towards the Dems.

So clearly, while they aren’t doing it for noble reasons (as it’s likely a billionaire donor’s pet cause - my bet would be either Thiel or Murdoch), they are proceeding with anti-trust cases against Big Tech. It is almost like the horseshoe theory of politics, in this case.

It beggars the question, if you truly believe that republicans are irredeemable - and absolutely nothing they could ever do would be worthy of support - what is going to be the ultimate outcome? Thinking more broadly, we Progressives are generally known for in-fighting over ideological purity - there ends up being “No True Scotsman”.

The reason why the far-right has been able to succeed over the past three decades in particular has been their willingness to make ‘allies of convenience’ with those that they don’t necessarily agree with on every topic.

Wall Street didn’t care about repealing Roe v. Wade, but they were more than happy to go along with is as long as the Religious Right delivered tax cuts. Quid Pro Quo. …

It’s getting very late here in Aus (1AM) and I have work tomorrow; but I want to pick this up again tomorrow as I still need to circle back around.

I don't have a favorite source so any searching will give you various perspectives but here's one I fully read that seems reasonably objective.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/

Essentially, they praised the Republican platform. Then they took it back and said we won't share political comments that aren't neutral. Then they shared some more pro-republican opinions. And then they again said "whoops our bad back to politically neutral comments."

I personally think political neutrality is a coward's position and most often used by the supporters of "The Empire" to hide their uniforms and obscure their salutes. I can understand when your company employs X people, it's a highly public company, and your product is something as detached from politics as possible like - oh idk - a twitch streamer showing videogame footage or something entirely entertainment based. Even then, I still think neutrality is the garden which allows weeds to thrive.

But this is worse than that, this is pro-republican people who got excited their guy won and got vocally bold, got punished, and are now going into hiding. And their company isn't an entertainment business, it's one who's product is intertwined with privacy and the digital/corporate landscape we live in today. Proton wouldn't be doing as well as they are if a pro-worker party was in power for the last 50 years. They wouldn't be as profitable if monopolies had been busted sooner and mergers denied. And this is only the tech related focus they'd like you to consider, which isn't fair. If the KKK are burning crosses in the front lawns of your neighbors and lynching people, it's a bit tone deaf to talk about how good their sponsored lunches are and it's evil to walk around the town square praising them for their lawn care. There are more important things they're responsible for than the things that benefit you. And that's even if you believe they're doing any good on this subject which I have not seen. Trump has approved historically massive mergers, republicans have removed people like Lina Khan who was actually doing good, and introduced people who have publicly said they want less scrutiny on business - while deregulating corporations and defanging the agencies responsible for holding corporations accountable.

I haven't seen, read, or heard any reasonable defense of any of these points and I think more people should be aware. We all make deals with the Empire at times, I'm not here to shame the workers, but if you're like me who wanted to move their email from Empire to something Rebel than you might as well know that Proton is not the best alternative you could choose.

I'm currently looking at mailbox.org as an alternative.

Trump appointed a anti-big-tech guy and the CEO of Proton praised trump (paraphrasing here "earlier the dems were the party of the small man, now the republicans are"). This was not an endorsement of Trump and only applied in the narrow context of the anti-big-tech appointment. But a lot of people didn't understand that context or ripped it out of that context and made it look like proton as a whole supports Trump.