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My wife just rolls her eyes and shakes her head when I tell her there are corporations like this in the world. She just thinks it's all a big conspiracy theory. "No corporation could be THAT powerful," is her logic.
This kind of thing started with the freakin' Hanseatic League. RAND is but the latest - and most successful - incarnation of such a monster. Any corporation that is so powerful that it can actually drive, not merely influence, government decisions is too powerful for any democracy.

RAND? Ayn Rand? Greed is good? Wtf? I would skip internet in favor of that single idea buried, in that sense RAND has done more harm than good.

"RAND is directly responsible for packet switching, the technology that made the Internet possible. It all started in the 1960s, when the military asked RAND researchers to solve a hypothetical question: If the Soviet Union destroyed all of our communication systems with a nuclear bomb, how could we fight back?"

This is a myth, the originators of the Internet have stated that surviving a nuclear strike, never came into the design.

"It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

In the film, Strangelove referred a study as having commissioned "by the Bland Corporation" to study the idea of a Doomsday Machine, but having rejected it "for reasons which at this moment are all too obvious."

I worked at Rand as a administrative assistant for over 5 years. To me, the culture appeared to encourage collaboration - but at the end of the day, highly competitive and back-stabbing. Who is writing the best paper and who is getting kudos and listed in references. Very high stress for us - keeping over ten researchers happy. Still recovering from the militant atmosphere and horrible supervisor.