Image: ChrisDag/Flickr
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It epitomizes the fox-watching-the-henhouse phenomenon so prevalent, and often so disastrous, in this murky age of big money politics—think of the ex-oil industry folks regulating offshore drilling at the Mineral Management Services right before the BP oil spill, or the meat and poultry industry people the USDA is recruiting to regulate food safety.As such, that a particularly telecom-friendly proposal to end net neutrality would weasel its way into consideration is hardly surprising. Nor is it surprising that when it comes to the FCC, almost all roads lead to Comcast, the company most primed to benefit from those slick new internet fast lanes—after all, it is poised to absorb Time Warner and become the biggest telecom in the history of the nation, thanks to the FCC's favorable merger rulings.So how corrupted is the office charged to protect consumers from telecom monopolists and traffic profiteers? How bad is it, really? According to the watchdog group LittleSis.org, which maintains a "free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government," it's about as bad as it gets. Kevin Connor, the org's co-founder, used LittleSis's new mapping tool, which is currently in beta, to whip up a chart of the interconnected FCC-telecom lovefest transpiring in just Wheeler's office alone for Motherboard:"The FCC might as well be a subsidiary of Comcast"
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