[intopieces]

>It's only real use is for pointing at and shouting "look at what new fangled technology is doing to us. we must restrict everything."

Absolutely correct. Tim Wu illustrates this beautifully in "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires." Basically, disruptive technology is nixed because it's cheaper to defend your entrenched method than to sail off into unknown waters, open to competition.

My favorite example from the book is Bell Laboratories, who invented a machine that could answer a telephone and record what the speaker was saying in the 1920s, but killed the project because they believed that people would stop using phones.