You're taking for granted that the FCC's new rules are antynomous with "protecting commercial interests." The ISPs will be fine either way, they already had government-granted monopolies. The rules were added at the behest of companies like Netflix, who felt they needed a regulatory cudgel to strengthen their position in price negotiations. Except what the FCC has also done is drop a lot of uncertainty and fear onto the ISP industry. That alone will stifle expansion. Far better would have been to end the idiotic local laws and regs that made monopolies of whichever broadband provider was first to a given market. Google Fiber only rolled out in places where city governments could be coaxed into liberalizing, and behold, Comcast is upgrading speed in those areas for free. Competition works. The market has not failed. The FCC "fixed" the wrong problem.

Maybe the EULA will be called The Covenant.

I think your explanation falls very short when you refer to municipal limitations on the number of competitors as a "natural" monopoly. There's nothing natural about it if it's a situation directly caused by limits imposed by government. Prospective ISPs should have been able to negotiate with property owners at all levels to build lines of any sort wherever it made sense. Capping local markets at one or two providers is where the Internet got off track, not when the beneficiaries of this corporate welfare started doing the only thing that made sense given their unassailable, government-granted position. So now we pile the FCC on top of a problem that never needed to exist. Like Harry Browne used to say: government will break your knees, then hand you a pair of crutches and say "See? Without us you couldn't walk!"

People seem to be conflating licenses and training, which is cute considering y'all just got done beating up on tech certifications in another thread. Should you need government permission to travel in your automated car? Hell no. Should you know what you are doing when climbing into one? Ideally, yes.

There is another reason to do so: The sincere belief that the alarmists are a threat to human survival. Their unconditional animosity against much-needed energy sources, if acted out in the political sphere to the degree that they wish, would doom billions to poverty and death. There is no doubt some risk in continuing to use fossil fuels the way we do, but governments are not who I would trust to quantify and hedge against that risk. They are much more likely to overreact or underreact for political reasons, costing the world countless lives. This is an unpopular opinion I'm sure. The technocratic idealists here who align with the alarmists are positive they know better how the world should run than those SUV-driving rubes out there, but such paternalistic hubris has gotten mankind into huge trouble before.

And now we see character assassination visited upon the person protesting character assassination. Classy.

Whenever scientists publish a controversial new cosmological theory there is no gossiping over who paid them. Because it doesn't matter. If their interpretation of the data is wrong, or if their model is wrong, all someone has to do is correct their work. Yet when it comes to "climate science" much ink is spilled disparaging the motives and character of anyone who challenges the orthodoxy. If he's wrong, show how he's wrong. I don't give a rat's behind who paid for what. The work either contributes to our understanding or it doesn't.

How exactly is risking capital to produce products people willfully buy "leaching off society"? Which government service exactly are they skipping out on paying for? Why not send them a bill for that instead of stabbing in the dark at arbitrary sums? When did it become "greedy" to keep your own money, and "justice" to take someone else's?

Judging from my 1099, no it is very much not free. May I cancel my service please?

Do you mean to say my taxes only pay for the desirable things my government does, and at the best possible price at all times? And that without this small group having a unilateral right to help themselves to other people's money -- so long as they honor bureaucratic protocols of course -- civilization would collapse into a Mad Max dytopia?

This is just one more episode in the perpetual game of cat and mouse between the makers and the takers.

Whether you want to blame NASA bureaucrats for covering their asses or Congresscritters for their warped priorities, this failure can be explained the same way. Government and its agencies are total strangers to the economic incentives of profit and loss. The only profits and losses they directly experience are the rise and fall of their bureaucratic clout. As a result, success and failure are defined on completely different terms versus a private endeavor. For an operation like SpaceX, success is getting the customer into space with the greatest practical efficiency. For NASA, success is whatever curries favor with the people in Congress deciding next year's budget. Congressmen don't care about what goes into space or how. They care that federal money gets back to their clients at home. The bickering in this thread over whether to blame NASA leadership or Congress misses the larger point: Both are culpable because of the incentives they operate under. This is just the economics of nationalized space exploration taking its inevitable course.