N.B. Charlie McCreevy tried to paint efforts to rectify patent law (and the EPO) as "anti-Americanism". It's a straw man. He said: "The theme, or the background music, to both of these particular directives you could see as part of, anti-globalisation, anti-Americanism, anti-big business protests --- in lots of senses, anti-the opening up of markets." To whom? To banks?
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it