What John Bear really said!!

[DR ANATIDAE]

I'm sorry, a list of urls to diploma mills proves what?
Yes, many private universities exist. But their authority almost always comes from the government. You cite the UK. In the UK, schools operate under a Royal Charter or an act of Parliament. But there are also other quality control functions ensuring they operate well. The scandal at the University of Liverpool is an example of that. Or take a place like Denmark, which has no process for approving private universities. Nor do they have a process for shutting them down. (Other forces must have taken care of that.) In Denmark, degrees awarded by unrecognized diploma mills were/are just that: unrecognized. They don't exist as degrees and have no standing, legal and otherwise. But the owners of such ersatz credentials can benefit on that other phenomenon that drives the diploma mill industry: people not checking too closely and not understanding what they see. In the U.S. the authority to operate a university comes from the individual states. As we've seen, some states have been quite lax in exercising this responsibility. Usually it's because they didn't have a diploma mill problem--until they did. Most of those state--California, Mississippi, Alabama, South Dakota, Hawaii, Wyoming, and others--moved to eliminate this stuff. There are very few places left for diploma mills to operate--thank goodness for the internet! A fake degree is a fake degree. Wishing it was real doesn't make it so. Imagine two of them!

Sadly, you have completely missed my point, or you simply know little about private universities or UK Chartered institutions, or don't appreciate how such institutions are managed. You also seem to have a strange fixation on degree mills!