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Comment by kablaa | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how much money influences these politicians. I would be amazed if any of the people who voted for this bill even fully understand what it is.

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It's also amazing how little it costs to buy them. It's on the order of a hundred thousand dollars. Check out campaign contributions and you'll see. It needs to be at least 10-100x more expensive to really make a difference. It'd be hilarious / depressing is politicians started colluding to squeeze companies for orders of magnitude more in bribes (sorry, "campaign contributions").

I wonder if it would be possible to make some kind of "internet superpack". Like a collection of registered voters who would crowdfund more money than they are getting.

Isn't that effectively what the EFF is?

Wasn't tehre an article recently about how SV (and coastal companies in general) have pretty much screwed themselves when it comes to this stuff?

As a total outsider - it's amazing that a place as huge as the US has a two-party system. splitting everything into one camp or the other makes for groupings that don't always work.

A two-party system is the expected result of plurality rule (which the US uses almost exclusively for national elections).[1]

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

In Tennessee Comcast emailed our state house asking if they want free TV political advertising, this was the day after blocking the expansion of municipal owned broadband. They know what they are doing.

> It's amazing how much money influences these politicians.

I don't understand the hand-wringing[1], why don't the well-paid technologists use their money to influence politicians too? Where is the copyleft-equivalent judo move to Citizens United? Are techies so savvy that getting involved in politics is beneath us? Or is Slacktivism enough 'engagement'? Black site banners can only take you so far.

1. Disclaimer: not american

"Surely we can wait for another corporatocracy to save us from this corporatocracy!"

It had nothing to do with money. Pai is a former Verizon lawyer. He did exactly as he was expected to do.

Tom Wheeler was a lobbyist for the Telecom industry..

Yes, but this was decades ago. Pai's tenure was more recent. On top of that, he has a few years in as an FCC commissioner where he's consistently voted down every pro-consumer act, and even outright refused to meet with Tom Wheeler during his time there.

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