2 ms·

Self-generated codes-of-good-practice usually emerge from out of the shadow of a big governmental stick on the horizon.

• dexterdog 10y ago
  And they generally help the industry members protect themselves from new competitors.
• sqeaky 10y ago
  That is certainly one view of it, but there is a clear difference between groups like UL and The Tobacco industry. I am not trying to that everything will work out in some kind of pure capitalist ideal utopia, because I think it clearly won't. Rather I think some industries have enough decent people in them that they can find good ways to increase profit and increase long term good will. People here make is sound like the ESRB was the only thing stopping video games being legislated out of existence. When the game industry chose to do it, they did it to attempt to make it easy to wholesale games correctly so walmart could confidentally buy games and not mix in porn and sex stores could readily get get all the AO games they wanted, this certainly prevented a few embarrassing situations with porn being mixed in with kid toys. The video game industry could have done something else; a purely selfish and stupidly self motivated industry might have sued the government, hired lobbyists, or made illegal back room deals some other way like it seems apparent. Big Pharma, Big Sugar, the "Military Industrial Complex", Big Oil and countless other Big whatever get accused of this all the time and often with decent evidence.