Fazal Majid is asking whether or not Americans have become second-class consumers:

• Sony's PEG-TH55 PDA has integrated WiFi and Bluetooth worldwide, except in the US where Bluetooth is omitted. This is incredibly annoying and rules the device out for me (unless I import one from the UK or Germany), as I have discovered from practical experience with my PEG-UX50 that WiFi access points are seldom available when you need them, and I often have to fall back to GPRS via Bluetooth. We are already saddled with the industrialized world's worst mobile telephone operators and clunkiest phones, why add injury to insult?
• Canon's new Digital Rebel DSLR is available in a kit with a 18-55mm lens. The lens has the smooth and fast USM ultrasonic motor in Japan, but uses the inferior AFD micro-motor in the US. Perhaps they believe US customers are too clueless to notice the difference.
• Many ultra-slim laptops available in Japan are never introduced in the US (this has created a market opportunity for parallel importers like Dynamism. Once again, the gaijin must lack the refined aesthetic sensibility to appreciate models like the Sony Vaio X-505 and are probably content to lug their boat anchor laptops in their gas-guzzling SUVs. Nor is this attitude limited to Japanese companies - until recently IBM had an entire line of ultra-compact notebook computers available only in Japan.
• Epson's Stylus Photo 2200, probably the favorite printer of professional photographers, does not include in the US the gray balancer, special software and calibration sheets used to improve the neutrality of black and white prints. Michael Reichmann puts it best when he calls this "The software that Epson North America thinks its customers are too dumb to use".

[via Fazal Majid's low-intensity weblog]

I take exception to a number of these. There is a cult of the camera in Japan that is so irrational it is difficult to believe. Japanese camera buyers will only buy the best, and will spend whatever it takes. Witness Epson's R-D1, a $4000 camera that uses $2000 lenses: all available copies will most likely be snapped up by the Japanese market. No one would buy the Digital Rebel kit with a non-USM lens in Japan. It is just a fact of that market.

Additionally, Japanese consumers have always favored size over power. Americans have typically favroed the opposite. This is partly a fact of living conditions (space is at a premium in many parts of Japan), and partly a reflection of the different ways consumers in the two countries use the devices. Computers targeted at the Japanese market have always been smaller than their American-market counterparts.

Still, Fazal asks a good question. The internet boomed in the U.S. because it was relatively easy to get connected. It was a matter of well trained people in the right place, at the right time. But as important as the people, the lack of absurd regulation helped, too.

Fazal seems to be wondering what kind of anti-consumer, graft-ridden legislation and regulation is hurting the American market. How has the lobbying and oligarchy-protection had a negative effect on American consumers and , by extension, American business?