[rhizome]

It's not even that complicated, they just want to use the existing pay-TV business models that businesspeople have studied for decades. It's highly inconvenient for established businesspeople to have to invent new business and revenue models, so a power grab and an encircling legal framework comes as no surprise. These are the people who hire lobbyists, and current internet freedoms are anathema to (the current form of) capitalism.

[simonh]

It's not anathema to capitalism at all. Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, Dropbox and many, many more are making good money off the internet as it is. I don't understand the anti-capitalism jibe. What's the alternative? Would they be better off as state owned public services?

[rhizome]

The idea is that the current state of capitalism, as I'm using the phrase, is somewhat static in the way that many Internet businesses are attempting to use it in terms of past business models. Consider the music industry.

Why are capitalists so sensitive that criticism always registers as "anti?" Psychologists have a lot to say about absolutist thinking, calling it "either/or," "black/white," "polarized," "binary," "catastrophizing," and similar. My illustration in terms of pay-TV should have been enough of a clue of the distinction I'm making, and that that distinction was not concerned with eliminating an entire ideology.