It sounds great until you realize that, in the US at least, the corporations spend a lot of money lobbying Washington to have the rules set in their favor if not eliminated. Fix that first and then I will believe we can have a government that would actually try to place appropriate ethical boundaries on corporations.
This is exactly correct. What people think will happen is:
1. Someone sees a problem and asks a politician to fix it.
2. The politicians enact effective regulation and the problem is solved.
What actually happens is:
1. Someone sees a problem and asks a politician to fix it.
2. The politicians start drafting regulation on the issue.
3. Companies lawyers come in and lobby to have the regulation amended to either be ineffective or disadvantage their competitors.
4. The mal-regulation is enacted and we're all worse off.
5. The companies involved benefit financially and use their money to hire more lawyers (and politicians).
It is necessary to first fix our political system before trying to put more regulation in place. Every time someone says "we need regulation" without doing so, they are making the problem worse, and supporting this corrupt system.
I feel like it's so obvious that it shouldn't have to be stated, but apparently it does: companies need to be regulated because they are composed of people (who are evil), but the governments that regulate those companies are composed of those same evil people and need to be controlled by their citizens. Everybody forgets about the second part, and it's the far more important one.
If more people were directly invested in laws favoring their means and ends, would they take the time to lobby too?
Folks certainly outnumber corporations (?), and they could create representatives for their interests.
Maybe the end-to-end process--from idea to law--is less familiar to most. Try explaining how a feature gets into production to a layperson, for example :)
Maybe we need more "skeletal deployments" in action, many dry runs, accreted over time, to enough folks. This could be done virtually and repeated many times before even going there.
