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this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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The US is a world leader in the "corporations are people" shenanigans. The massive overreach is fait accompli.
Corporations get to do their "Speech" in all kinds of ways such as funding political initiatives, dictating the healthcare their workers receive, etc. In this context, your point falls very flat.
Also, it is general practice in many places that businesses (even those who are not "people") can refuse to service customers for arbitrary reasons as long as they do not break some superseding law in the process. You can refuse entry to people with dogs, if you don't like dogs. But usually not to people with service animals, because having a service animal may be a protected class. (On the basis of having a service animal. Of course, if someone comes with one pet dog and one service animal, you don't have to let the pet in.)
I do not know of any jurisdiction that sets out doing genocide as a protected class.
I just don't see it doing any good. Why would Israel's military, supplied with US military hardware, care about Microsoft? Or Apple or Google or Amazon or... I'm sure none of their critical military infrastructure is in danger if one or several of these companies turn on them.
And how does Microsoft even enforce this ban? Turn off Windows remotely? It's not even clear how such a ban on Israel-linked business would work.
If world governments want to put sanctions on Israel and Gaza to try and make the two governments come to the table, I think that's a much better strategy.
It is actually pretty easy to answer questions like this by searching the web. Below, I have done some work for you.
First, though, gotta say that the most generous reading of your arguments is that you are philosophically defeatist and suffer from "the perfect is the enemy of the good"---- why do anything except the one final action that will solve it for good? If that is your attitude, why bother posting on a forum? Why bother doing anything?? To learn about the broader strategy, you could try Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions - Wikipedia. Nobody is arguing that MS should be targeted instead of promoting governments to sanction and remove the subsidies that keep it afloat. But Brian Eno thinks he has more sway with MS than with the US government, so that's what he's throwing his back into.
'Microsoft Powers This Genocide': Firm Fires Pro-Palestine Disruptors of 50th Anniversary Celebration | Common Dreams
Ex-Microsoft employees expose company's role in Gaza genocide, quoting Hossam Nasr:
Microsoft must be held accountable for its complicity in Gaza genocide, rights group says – Middle East Monitor
That's probably a fair assessment.
But I feel like the core of my argument remains: I'm not disputing that MS or Google or Amazon or Apple services are sold to people and orgs who use them to commit evil. Of course they are.
But these aren't munitions. They are general-purpose computing products being turned to evil outcomes by bad actors. The article, for example, cites Microsoft's open-source LAVENDER, which is a general purpose image and video analysis tool for AI. Describing it as:
This simply isn't true. Somebody in the Israeli military used LAVENDER to process video data to identify bombing targets, like somebody might use a hammer to smash someone's head in. The articles you cite are full of rhetorical tricks to imply that Microsoft corporate had some hand in the decision making, but it's genuinely all "well the Israeli military has some Azure servers, therefore Microsoft killed people".
Which militaries should Microsoft (or Google or Apple or Amazon, etc) be allowed to sell products to? Who makes that determination? A cohort of employees or consumers? NGOs?
If government makes the call -- distilling a public consensus on the matter, one hopes -- then I can see some reasonable way to approach this question.
EDIT: Details on LAVENDER:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/lavender-unifying-video-language-understanding-as-masked-language-modeling/