bspringstead

    I used to buy video games at a Gamestop next to my neighborhood supermarket. At one point, they had an employee that seemed to love to make unnecessary negative comments about my taste in games. It's a manager's prerogative to fire the employee for providing a bad customer experience, just like it was mine to just get my games somewhere else. Ultimately donors are think tank customers, and this is all perfectly fine: the world where I am forced to go to the same store, or a Gamestop manager has to tolerate an employee that tries to deter people from buying non-Microsoft products, is probably worse than one where someone on a think tank has to measure what they say.
     There's learnings to had here though: The case of a think tank relying on very few donors is no different than a B2B startup that relies on a single enterprise company: You have a tremendous risk, the funding can disappear at any time, and for any reason. Anything other than diversification puts you at risk, and it's not really the customer's fault if you put yourself in a very weak position.
     This also affects far bigger fish, like media companies and even legislators. And that's why we should have care when it comes to both media consolidation, or mechanisms where very few people can have a very big influence on the outcome of an election. But it's not as if we live in a world where the only way to have a think tank that produces policy proposals is to clear everything with Google.