Oh yeah and those "public comments" aren't just a sham, right?
I took a post-grad course that covered this, and it's clearly outlined as a public relations angle to "get people to think they have a voice" and "to blow off some steam", while then allowing the corporation to do whatever they had intended to do in the first place.
Look what happened with the .ORG price increases - 99%+ of the comments were against the price increases, yet they went through without a hitch and with ICANN/PIR contending that most were fake or auto-generated, neglecting of course the sheer number of non-profits who signed their name to the comments.
These "public comments" and "town hall meetings" are all a sham and nothing ever changes. Money talks and money walks, and unless there is a legal challenge, the price increases will arrive as expected.
We saw a clip on the NEB, a supposedly-independent organization that determines whether pipelines go through or not. At a townhall meeting the NEB reps were asked if they "ever said no to a pipeline". The NEB gentlemen paused, looked a bit shaken, and then said something like "Our job is to make sure pipelines go through, not to say no."
I observed one last year concerning a huge apartment building going up in the middle of a residential neighborhood - every zoning/parking/obstruction/roadway bylaw imaginable had to be changed and tons of politicians paid off (there were several "championing" the project), but every voice there was against it, from residents to city traffic to MPs to the mayor (who probably didn't get paid off) to environmental advocates.
I drove by yesterday and the monolith is about half-done. Oh, and two of the championing politicians divorced their wives, retired, and are now in the Caribbean on permanent vacations. A local newspaper even interviewed one.
