Sure. And the outpouring of support for ratification of OOXML as an ISO standard wasn't motivated by Microsoft. Nor was the large influx of new "P" members who arrived just in time to vote to adopt OOXML. Absolutely.
The fact that those "P" members refused to meet their obligations to cast a vote in any later ballots (resulting in the failure of several key ballots, bringing ISO to a standstill) only strengthens the claim that their actions were genuine grassroots activity. No. Doubt.
Megacorps never use their massive gobs of money and influence to co-opt processes that require all participants to mostly operate in good faith. Nope.
> States take years and years to make policy change.
The USian post-9/11 hysteria would like to have a word with you. Authoritarians rarely miss an opportunity to manufacture (or inflame) a crisis in order to present their pre-prepared rules changes that just happen to further expand their power and influence.
> I think the state's true goal is more about foreign influence. ... From the perspective of the state, they already know who you are when posting domestically.
Not in the US, no. Not without a fair bit of legwork. Though, I don't know much about the situation on the ground in countries like Britain and Germany. Perhaps things are so now bad there that you need to attach your Posting Loicense/Papers to everything you post, IDK.
> What they're gaining is an enhanced ability to ban externals from posting.
Yeah, here it is. "Keep those fuzzy foreigners out of our discussions!".
For the sake of discussion, let's assume that banning and/or jailing "Those People" is a reasonable thing to want to do. [0] The problem with this is that once you deploy and normalize this sort of "social technology", it always, always creeps further. Today it's "dangerous foreigners" with their "subversive ideologies". Five, ten years from now, it's whoever is the equivalent of today's LGBT&etc underclass.
[0] It's absolutely not. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The remedy for falsehood is truth. The remedy for invalid attempts to sow discontent is to show how those attempts are not grounded in fact.
