And then of of course you get to the discussion of which regulations make sense and that is a very very broad discussion because there are people on both sides (guess on which side the big corps are..).
The pro-regulation side?
That's way too easy an answer.
They are definitely on the anti-regulation side.
But the situation is that there are regulations. So their NEW strategy is to bend the regulations to their will. Which is bad.
So, as i said before, regulations are still nessesary, but we need to keep them in check. One of the biggest problems in the western world is that we let our governments be bribed (lobbied) by these corporate entities. This is fundamentaly a wrong way of doing it.
It's not that regulations are bad, they are simply not used well.
Still, i don't think there will be happy times without any regulations at all. It is a teenage fantasy to think it could work.
wow look at all the black and white answers, sorry but it is not so cut and dried, the people against regulations are those who are held back by them, those who are for them are the ones that the regulations protect their businesses so they don't have to keep innovating to keep on top of the game, so they can slack off, so you have corporations and people on both sides of this fence in every area of the world, and that group of people keeps churning based on those that were on one side and having trouble, who succeed on busting through that line and get to the side where the regulations now protect them from the hungry masses that will out innovate them, with out the regulations, so the ones supporting the regulations are those protected with them, and the faces on both sides keep changing, as they move from that one side to the other.
as for any utopia that the zeitgiest people are seeking (and the venus project) we will not see anything like this no matter what is done until technology can provide it. we will just end up with 1984, another soviet union, or another Nazi Germany, where the masses are again held down against their will by those with guns to keep them doing all the work the people with the guns don't want to do, while not having to pay the masses for this dirty work.
to achieve a truly free society we need a damn near anarcho-capitalist system that is more liberating than libertarianism in the extreme brought on by the lack of control over people by their holding technology that totally frees them, and is understood by even the lowest common denominator. The computer does for data what we need to be able to do with resources as common as the carbon in the lawn clippings in your lawn, enabling you to, with the click of a mouse button, have a device break it down and extract all that carbon, then send it to another device (all probably the size of something sitting on a desk top) to be reconstructed into any form needed to complete the task of making what the clicker wanted, such as say a new phone made of various carbon based plastics, carbon based seminconductors and non conductors to make their items they want and need (food, tech, medicine, transportation, clothing) from stuff they don't want anymore and today we pay someone to take away for us so we dont have to see it anymore. and we will not see an end to money till we have a triad of tech, an energy from something abundant, a way to convert materials in things no one wants anymore, into something usable, and a tech that lets us turn that usable material into the goods we want, all using files and data that people do not have to understand to use. Very few can build or understands how a phone is made for the most part, yet they are used by most of what we consider the civilized world, and we will need something that can basically allow sharing of information that is compiled already to get over that hurdle for the average joe, then we can start talking resource based economy, or basically where resources are the money of the day. Carbon no matter what form it is in, is worth just as much as it would be in a diamond, and diamonds would only be worth the carbon in them, at that point since we could just print out diamond objects any shape we want.