I'm not talking about invisible hands, just contentment amongst the devious men of whom you speak. Suitable motivations include threats of violence, communism, etc.

What, again?

I'm pretty sure networks are oversubscribed because ISPs have no motivation to improve them. The margins for large service providers are ridiculous. A lot more infrastructure can be built before providing internet access becomes unprofitable.

Do the firmware updates actually do anything, though? In three years of owning a third-generation wifi Kindle, I have never seen anything change—despite a handful of significant-seeming firmware updates. If they're security-related... then airplane mode still solves that.

I think you may need more people in your model—you have Elizabeth Taylor marrying herself at least eight times.

From TFA:

This sounds comically similar to a villain trying to conceal the remains of a failed plan to frame someone.

This kind of abusive segregation-of-vendor-and-producer legislation goes back even further, to 1936: General Motors bought laws that prohibited power companies from owning transit services, gradually and systematically destroying the streetcar systems in almost every city in the United States. If that hadn't happened, I suspect combustion engine vehicles would not have attained the dominance they enjoyed during the latter half of the 20th century. The impacts this would have on the energy and ecological situations are hard to predict, but I'm willing to bet the world would've been better off by a significant margin.

The moral of this tale: any time anyone involved in the automotive industry wants something legislated, it's probably really, really fucking evil.

As Spy Handler suggested, the bar would only be raised as high as the chief of police's scruples. Fortunately, centralizing corruption means there's only one head that needs to roll in order to fix a rotten department.

The GOP was instrumental in killing SOPA. So... there's that.

Nope and nope. "I chicken at least have."

It is a time-honoured tradition amongst writers to put together thinly-veiled pseudo-anecdotal essays. Just try to think of it as slightly less boring than just reading the bare essay itself.

Well... that's one of the perks of the (very slightly pyramid-scheme-like) nature of transhumanism—it's diminishingly difficult to accurately predict what innovations will be practical or broadly appealing, so sometimes it's better to just say "if we throw all of our energy into it, it's sure to be fantastic!" rather than to make specific promises. (Of course, the story does make quite a few specific suggestions, so that's not really what you're talking about, but it seemed pertinent.)

Wait, wait, I know this one! Ah, nothing like innovations in management to remind you that a dystopia is always possible. Anyone who hasn't read Manna, go do it! It is worth it.

It's too bad so much iconic dystopic science fiction was written or cinematized in the 80s (Nineteen Eighty-Four and Bladerunner, to name but two film examples), since it means that all you need to trick people into thinking it's impossible is a bright and cheery computer interface.