Tanis said:
Also:
We need to force our congress to make it ILLEGAL to have been or become a lobbyist with regards to offices like, well, Congress and government agencies.
This is so disturbingly and depressingly common it has a term associated with the practice: the "revolving door". The Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Beareau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Consumer Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture, Antitrust Division, and pretty much any 3 letter government acronym responsible for protecting people from profitable but dangerous business decisions has been sponged off of, defanged or completely gutted by this practice.
In some ways it makes sense, as the only people with the theoretically relevant expertise in the subject would have to come from inside the industry. But the problem is that the people that get into these positions are voted on by politicians, the same people that are taking massive campaign contributions from these same lobbyist groups that are sponsored by the businesses that are supposed to be regulated by these agencies!
It will never, ever, ever end so long as money is so freely and easily allowed to flow into politics, particularly in the form of outright bribes for favors- er, sorry, "campaign contributions" for voting certain ways on specific bills, introducing certain bills, and adding measures and language to existing bills. How exactly that doesn't constitute a bribe, I'll never fucking understand. (I understand that "campaign contributions" aren't supposed to end up in congresspeople's bank accounts, they're supposed to be legally separate, but every contribution is money of their own they don't have to spend, so it amounts to the same thing in practice.)
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Now you might look at that long post and assume that I'm positing some kind of unified conspiracy. That's not the case. What I'm saying is that, in individual subsets, businesses have realized it's more profitable to spend a few hundred million lobbying for lax and even completely toothless regulations that allow them to turn around and make billions, regardless of the damage to the end user/consumer. It's capitalism at its logical conclusion, unchecked money flow being leveraged to stack the deck so it keeps flowing back towards those who already have it. That's what it means to maximize profits, and businesses that don't maximize profits generally go out of business or fire their CEOs.
I have multiple examples of industry lobbyists utterly destroying various governmental agencies to the point where they are unable to do their jobs of protecting the public, if anyone really feels like becoming very very angry.
Sadly, almost no one was here [link: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.826868-IP-Enforcer-Leaves-White-House-Joins-Anti-Piracy-Trade-Group#20087083] last time the Escapist discussed this issue[/link].
Someones is going to have pay for the infrastructure costs involved in the increased bandwidth because of video on demand. Its either going to be the the companies that stream or the isp's. They are not going to be able pass 100% of the cost on to the consumer, so some is going to have to take a hit on their margin. This whole net neutrality debate is being funded by corporate lobbyists acting on behalf of the streaming companies. As usual fashionable liberal opinion buys the anti corporate line while ignoring the fact the main beneficiaries are other corporations.
ISPs profit margins are INSANE and they had undergone little to no infrastructure upgrades during the 2005-2010 period due to the
lack of competition. The US average price/(mb/s) is $3.56, beaten by Europe ($3.50), China ($2.06), Russia ($1), and let's not even talk about South Korea or Japan before we embarrass ourselves. The US is 32nd in speed/cost of the 65 countries being tracked via [link:http://explorer.netindex.com/maps] Speedtest.net data[/link]. Current ISPs are so greedy that Google is, by all reports, going to make a profit by offering internet at a cost of 7
cents/mb.
ISPs currently have little to no regional competition and are doing their damndest to block competitor expansion via lobbying at every possible level. Hardly the behavior of a healthy free market.
