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The question of how to maintain power goes back to antiquity. Of course Putin is very familiar with it. He lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has kept power for decades now. He's obviously quite skilled at whatever's necessary (which is not to say he's invulnerable, but whatever happens in the future, he managed to survive for a long time).

Note "Network neutrality" is a terrible example here, since the dispute was exactly that both sides thought a lot of money could change hands during the potential time-lag until the supposed "self-regulation" worked out, if it ever did. It was really amusing in a way. There were the big ISP's saying "We think we can extract a lot of money from Google, etc, and we want to try it". And there was Google, etc saying "We think the big ISP's can extract a lot of money from us, and we don't want them to even try it". Then there were the ideologues saying "Both of you enormous sets of companies are completely wrong, the Free Market makes it impossible to happen!" The business ecosystem changed enough to moot the original dispute. But it sure wasn't due to "self-regulation" in any typical sense of the word.

Anyway, I doubt Sam Bankman-Fried is an idiot on this matter, though I could be wrong. It would seem like an obvious question that someone could ask him.

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