Re:FCC threatens carriers with 'regulatory intervention' ove...
by tialaramex on Thursday February 14, 2019 @09:32AM
(#19162089)
Regulations are always going to be "too broad" to magically work if enforced by people who haven't got your best interests at heart, the solution is neither to try to imagine some hypothetical regulation that is "narrow enough" nor to give up regulating and wring our hands at the consequences as unregulated capitalism cheerfully kills us all to make a few pennies more, but to get _good regulators_
The UK has a lot of white collar crooks who'd really rather you didn't know what they own. Companies House, the regulator and list of all companies incorporated in the UK, was told wink wink to get them to list the actual Human People who control them.
Unsurprisingly in practice the result is full of obvious lies (corporations listed instead of Human People for example) and omissions (companies that claim there is no-one controlling them when obviously they're actually run by a Russian oligarch who suspects his name on the paperwork might make life trickier)
When asked about this Companies House says alas, it doesn't have the funding needed to ever actually prosecute anyone for violating the law. Too bad.
But it turns out they did find enough money to prosecute exactly one person. The person who registered bogus companies with the names of politicians who allowed this bullshit to happen as the Human Persons controlling them. That person, unlike all the tax evading billionaires, crooks, and mass murderers known to be violating the law, got prosecuted...
The _wrong_ lesson is that we shouldn't have asked. The _right_ lesson is that the government is complicit and its regulator needs to be run by somebody who isn't there to cover for the bad guys.
The UK has a lot of white collar crooks who'd really rather you didn't know what they own. Companies House, the regulator and list of all companies incorporated in the UK, was told wink wink to get them to list the actual Human People who control them.
Unsurprisingly in practice the result is full of obvious lies (corporations listed instead of Human People for example) and omissions (companies that claim there is no-one controlling them when obviously they're actually run by a Russian oligarch who suspects his name on the paperwork might make life trickier)
When asked about this Companies House says alas, it doesn't have the funding needed to ever actually prosecute anyone for violating the law. Too bad.
But it turns out they did find enough money to prosecute exactly one person. The person who registered bogus companies with the names of politicians who allowed this bullshit to happen as the Human Persons controlling them. That person, unlike all the tax evading billionaires, crooks, and mass murderers known to be violating the law, got prosecuted...
The _wrong_ lesson is that we shouldn't have asked. The _right_ lesson is that the government is complicit and its regulator needs to be run by somebody who isn't there to cover for the bad guys.