[rjzzleep]

I wouldn't disagree. The fact that they can force the government to do their bidding is corruption in my eyes too.

The carmakers in Germany shut down various attempts to incentivize electronic cars and inquiries in their criminal behavior in the cheating scandals.

I think there is a fine line between lobbying and being downright criminal. I think most companies have actually crossed the line.

Deutsche Bahn after privatization let the train tracks in Hamburg rot for a long time. Now that they've passed the safety threshold they decided not to renew the tracks but instead move the train station somewhere else.

I've been involved in a government construction project and the way the contracts are handed out are on the surface to the highest bidder, but it's hard to call it anything but corrupt.

Lobbying is one thing, but threatening consultants and employees with repercussions and lawsuits for wanting to inform people about lies that led to these contracts is in fact criminal. I had a good lawyer, but nothing happened to the leadership on either side and nothing probably ever will.

[zaarn]

The EU generally talks to the industry affected by some regulations, this is generally to prevent deploying a regulation or law that doesn't really work in practise and to find a reasonable compromise (of course, sometimes multiple industries end up at the table, some with more political power than others, which is how you get the EU copyright reform pushed by newspapers and yellow journalists)

[tomatocracy]

The effect is more often, and I think more accurately, termed 'regulatory capture' than corruption. The other side of it is that the incumbents work to ensure that regulation presents a very high barrier to entry for any would-be competitor.

[zaarn]

Well, in this case it's not about competitors, it's about newspapers and publishers wanting to extract money from Google for displaying the <title> attribute of their website.