This is an example of what I’ve come to think of as “the impunity problem”. It’s not that bad shit isn’t illegal (it is), or that it’s undetected (it is done in plain sight), or even that the public aren’t paying attention (for such a geeky issue, people are remarkably aware of Net Neut).
The problem is that nothing happens. I guess it’s so endemic, and so sprawling as a criminal enterprise, that it’s logistically impossible to purge this sort of thing without that purge itself becoming massively political. Because, if prosecutors started making examples, they’d have to ignore a hundred equally deserving cases for every one they prosecuted, and there’s probably no way to make those choices without being derailed by spurious “partisan bias” accusations and/or actual partisan bias.
I know some countries have had meaningful anti-corruption purges, and I’d be curious to know exactly how they overcame that. I have a nasty suspicion that it can only work once you have an undeniable one-party system, so that the only partisan interests are “the government” and “the people”. In the US, even judges are party-affiliated so that may never be possible.
