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>> In what way is regulatory capture corruption?

Try getting a decent mobile data plan in Canada. It will be rapidly apparent to you.

I see what you're saying, but in what way is that strictly corruption? I think what I'm really asking is, where do we draw the line on what is corruption and what isn't? To me, regulatory capture, and a fair amount of public economics, is just 'how things are'. There are ways to try to reduce certain aspects of it, but are we really willing to ban movement between working in industry and the regulatory side of things like we ban bribery?

When a government created and sanctioned body has the effective ability to make or break players in an industry, and that body becomes utterly owned by the incumbents. It stops representing the public interests and begins defending the incumbents from market forces that motivate those incumbents to compete fairly, offer reasonably current services or even innovate new ones as a means to compete.

In short, they represent corporate interests while ostensibly being the people's governing body. This is imho, corruption. I don't know how exactly you regulate this away - perhaps mandate a percentage of the regulators specifically be from outside the industry.

Edit: for completion of sentence/thought

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