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I wonder what the motivation for voting this way is as you see it here in the US as well. Are the legislators all simply driven by money that's thrown at them b

I wonder what the motivation for voting this way is as you see it here in the US as well. Are the legislators all simply driven by money that's thrown at them by lobbyists? Or do they simply interpret the concept of the Internet differently? I try to be an optimist and to assume that most lawmakers actually work from the idea that they are making the world better, even if I disagree with their positioning. But this seems so basic that it's difficult to understand how elite-educated people can act this way except through greed.

rayiner 13y ago
To politicians, particularly in the U.S., the internet is just another piece of of commercial infrastructure. Its for shopping on Amazon and the like. Very few people in politics have high minded ideals about the internet connecting people and disseminating knowledge and overcoming borders and whatnot. Partly because most politicians aren't of that generation, but also because idealists don't get very far in politics. To the extent they have ideals, its usually all about protecting private property,[1] not openness or fairness or such ideas many would consider hippie bullshit. It would be great for the tech industry if it was all about lobbying, because the tech industry has more money than the telecom companies. Facebook could buy the full lobbying capacity of the top 10 DC lobbying firms for about half a century for how much they spent on WhatsApp. That's not the bottleneck. [1] The particular challenge in the U.S. is that at least nominally, almost all the telecom investment is private money. There are subsidies, but the cable companies top the charts for capital expenditures. There is a strong disdain for the idea of telling companies what to do with the infrastructure they built. This is less of a problem in Europe, where much more of the infrastructure was built with government money.

rayiner 13y ago

To politicians, particularly in the U.S., the internet is just another piece of of commercial infrastructure. Its for shopping on Amazon and the like. Very few people in politics have high minded ideals about the internet connecting people and disseminating knowledge and overcoming borders and whatnot. Partly because most politicians aren't of that generation, but also because idealists don't get very far in politics. To the extent they have ideals, its usually all about protecting private property,[1] not openness or fairness or such ideas many would consider hippie bullshit. It would be great for the tech industry if it was all about lobbying, because the tech industry has more money than the telecom companies. Facebook could buy the full lobbying capacity of the top 10 DC lobbying firms for about half a century for how much they spent on WhatsApp. That's not the bottleneck. [1] The particular challenge in the U.S. is that at least nominally, almost all the telecom investment is private money. There are subsidies, but the cable companies top the charts for capital expenditures. There is a strong disdain for the idea of telling companies what to do with the infrastructure they built. This is less of a problem in Europe, where much more of the infrastructure was built with government money.