You know what's funny... I heard a very similar thing said by a company making a device for medical purposes. They said that they needed to charge a high price because it was for the betterment of humanity. They were planning on donating some of the raised funds to charity and put the rest of the money back into R&D to make more life saving drugs.
That excuse was made by Martin Sshkreli on a news show if memory serves me right. He was talking about the price hikes on one of their medical products.
In my opinion "It's fine! We're going to develop life saving drugs with this!" is a very similar argument to "It's fine! We're going to give the money to charity!".
I know these are very different but I'd like to hear what others have to say about this.
In Marc Andreessen's case it really, really makes sense though, at least from my POV.
How is it an excuse for a technology company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be giving people technology.
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To put it in clearer terms, Marc Andreessen is with the crowd that has the most to gain from charity contributions. He's got his fingers in all the right pies to make a lot of money from the results of more charity activities. He can is described as "a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook,[5] eBay,[6] and Hewlett Packard Enterprise,[7] among others" according to wikipedia and he was apperently involved with Free Basics.
The Free Basics thing is exactly the worst possible thing for any third world county I can think of. Getting spoon fed the "right" information from an overload mega-corp.
I think it's fair to say that his buisness is collecting data on people and manipulating them and that "just happens to include providing technology" which is one of the things he can do by finding selective charities.
