Corporate Capture of Government
T-Mobile's US division is just one of a vast number of US corporations that have skated along with piss-poor data security practices for years to pad their profits because the consequences of such public-hostile practices have almost always been minimal.
FINALLY we have leadership personnel at regulatory agencies like the FCC that are actually making an effort to do something about this, but in turn these agencies like the FCC and FTC are also hamstrung by the US courts, which often rule in favor of the corporate interests if they run to court over it. As a result, their "enforcement actions" are often weaksauce, because that is all they can reasonably expect to get past the civil court system.
The Biden administration was able to address much of the corporate regulatory capture of federal regulatory agencies in a matter of a few years, an impressive achievement. (And a stark contrast to the norms of the last ~40 years) Fixing the heavily pro-corporate weighted federal judiciary after years of pollution by the likes of entities like the Federalist Society will take a lot longer, if ever, to fix.
Most Americans are still in thrall to the widespread cultural mythology here that large corporations where CEOs today are typically being paid 300-600 times what their average worker are being paid* are just benevolent dispensers of lovely jobs and cool stuff to you, the ever-grateful little people.
Until that changes, expect more of the same when it comes to corporate regulation.
*(Whereas the average CEO-to-worker pay disparity in 1965 was just 21 to 1.)
https://www.progressivecaucuscenter.org/the-ceo-pay-problem-and-what-we-can-do-about-it
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
