Keep in mind a 6 company oligarchy controls almost all of the media coming out of the United States.
The United States has a lot more resources than New Zealand. So there are plenty of other ways for them to incentivize cooperation. I just thought I'd throw out this random fact that a significant amount of films are shot there.
With regards to dotcom's extradition, I do think the initial raid on his house was an absolute disgrace, but it seems pretty unlikely that he would have had the grace of the court this long in any other OECD country, although that's partly because of the idiotically bungled warrants. The extradition process would have been much faster from the UK for example. [1]
As a rule, our judges are typically not very cooperative with our government [2], let alone foreign ones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK%E2%80%93US_extradition_trea...
[2] http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/69299045/judge-critical-o...
There are numerous Latin American countries with known narcoterrorists and traffickers that refuse to extradite their criminals to the US, even though their criminals had a direct impact on the lives of US citizens.
On the other hand, Kim Schmitz' crimes are relatively benign compared to those committed by narcoterrorists. It just goes to show how backwards the priorities are for our politicians.