Re:EU Cancels 'Final' Negotiations on EU Copyright Directive
by pjc50 on Saturday January 19, 2019 @05:01PM
(#18949458)
To be honest, only marginally better, but there was a bit more sanity in the discourse before FB ads from anonymous sources, and a bit more restraint before someone figured out that they could exploit the NI-only rules allowing anonymity for donations to put half a million quid through for Brexit.
(NI politics has been deeply dysfunctional since the 60s; it managed a decade and a half of normal politics before collapsing in a fraud scandal. Its devolved government has been shut down for two years. A bomb has just gone off in Derry, perhaps a sign of more to come. Brexit and the small government majority has allowed this dysfunctionality to leak into meanland government)
Weak investigations have been made into all the breaches of rules during the Brexit campaign, but nobody has been prosecuted yet.
My libertarian side wants to push back on these controls but after seeing Sheldon Adelson basically write the recent legislation on online gambling that directly benefits his own interests in the industry I’m becoming far more skeptical of its value.
It’s sold as allowing more freedom for private citizens and industry but in reality the greatest winners will be the giant companies, who can naturally buy the most influence (and get their old private school buddies in Congress) to squeeze out their competition and build barriers to entry.
Which is fundamentally anti-private business. And which reflects a long trend in American politics where the “free market” label is used to sell things very much anti-free market, which then causes more people to blame free markets as the problem (when all along it was the business elite winning over the political elite for gain, not anything like a market).