> You make it sound like the only possible motivation a person might have to start such a business would be to exploit the incarcerated.
Initial motivations are irrelevant. At some point, the motivations of a business reduce to "make money", and anyone or anything that gets in the way of that doesn't matter, including your ethics and initial motivations.
There are lots of innocuous reasons why that happens. For example, you believe your business is doing good, right? So your business has to survive to keep doing good. And you need to make money to survive. So surely it's okay if you make it easy to pay for your service while you're in jail, perhaps by making deals with prisons to allow them to sign up in prison. Hm, that didn't work, prisons aren't doing it. Perhaps you can give prisons a cut of the sales for the service. And voila, now you're profiting from slave labor because the prisons just automatically deduct it from prisoner's pay, which is already below minimum wage, for work they can't opt out of. Of course you don't know that, so you hire 10 employees with your sudden influx of money and start expanding sales to more prison systems. And then you find out that your income stream is... not perfect, but now you've got a responsibility to your employees. McDonalds and JCrew do it, you're not doing anything worse than anyone else. And it's not exactly slavery--they're paid $1/hour (nevermind that a tampon in the commissary is $20). You're practically paying them, just with a service rather than money, right? And your business is doing good, so you have to do this, even if it's not perfect, so your business can survive and continue to do good!
The thing end-stage capitalist circles can't or won't understand is that if it's not this compromise, it's some other compromise or set of compromises. In any individual situation, doing good and making money might be compatible or incompatible, but there's only so many of those situations where you can choose good over money before your competitor knocks you out of the market.
"When you sit down in the studio to make money, God leaves the room." -Quincy Jones
What about the corporate structure of the Guardian newspaper in the UK - a for-profit business 100% owned by a not-for-profit? The not-for-profit isn’t allowed to pay dividends, so 100% of the profits are either reinvested in the business, invested in the not-for-profit’s endowment, or donated to charity
This has some overlap with the structures used by OpenAI and Mozilla, but unlike OpenAI, the Guardian doesn’t have any “capped profits”, 100% of profits go to the not-for-profit owner. There are employee salaries to pay, and likely also some debt interest, but those are an expense not a profit distribution
I'm struggling to see what problem you think this solves, or why this is a response to what I posted.
Ask yourself: are you trying to imagine a way of helping inmates retain access to their Google services, or are you trying to shoehorn a business into the much more obvious solutions to that problem?
If you don’t make something people want, you fail. If you don’t make the unit then the overall economics work, you also fail. If you fail, no one else is helped.
This is a dumb business to create, not because it’s technically hard, or because it wouldn’t help some people, but because Google is one policy email away from making your business obsolete. If you get traction, they’re fairly likely to do that for the PR.
Initial motivations are irrelevant. At some point, the motivations of a business reduce to "make money", and anyone or anything that gets in the way of that doesn't matter, including your ethics and initial motivations.
There are lots of innocuous reasons why that happens. For example, you believe your business is doing good, right? So your business has to survive to keep doing good. And you need to make money to survive. So surely it's okay if you make it easy to pay for your service while you're in jail, perhaps by making deals with prisons to allow them to sign up in prison. Hm, that didn't work, prisons aren't doing it. Perhaps you can give prisons a cut of the sales for the service. And voila, now you're profiting from slave labor because the prisons just automatically deduct it from prisoner's pay, which is already below minimum wage, for work they can't opt out of. Of course you don't know that, so you hire 10 employees with your sudden influx of money and start expanding sales to more prison systems. And then you find out that your income stream is... not perfect, but now you've got a responsibility to your employees. McDonalds and JCrew do it, you're not doing anything worse than anyone else. And it's not exactly slavery--they're paid $1/hour (nevermind that a tampon in the commissary is $20). You're practically paying them, just with a service rather than money, right? And your business is doing good, so you have to do this, even if it's not perfect, so your business can survive and continue to do good!
The thing end-stage capitalist circles can't or won't understand is that if it's not this compromise, it's some other compromise or set of compromises. In any individual situation, doing good and making money might be compatible or incompatible, but there's only so many of those situations where you can choose good over money before your competitor knocks you out of the market.
"When you sit down in the studio to make money, God leaves the room." -Quincy Jones