Back in the 2600 case over the DeCSS source code the courts said that it was effectively illegal to link to something illegal.
That's too broad of an interpretation, I believe. The specific law, as I recall, involved made it illegal to distribute certain kinds of information (which they should have found unconstitutional, but that's another problem), and they found that linking to the information violated that law.
I'm pretty sure the court in that case did not articulate a general rule that it is categorically illegal to create a hyperlink to content which is itself illegal. Though in many cases, the laws that make content illegal might also apply to linking (particularly deliberate, specific linking) to such content.
If you're paying any attention to this story beyond simple partisan axe grinding, you'll find that people like Bush's arch-nemises in the house and senate (like Nancy Pelosi) have been briefed on these exact NSA programs since 2001, just weeks after 9/11.
Whether they were briefed on the "exact" programs or not is not clear; apparently, Pelosi was briefed on something related to the program that came to light months ago, and objected to it when she was briefed on it. OTOH, since the program that has recently come to light is not the same one that was revealed months ago, its not at all clear who was briefed on what, though in order to provide political cover, the administration has released lists purporting to account the number of times particular members received some briefing relating to the NSA surveillance programs.
But the number of briefings isn't the issue, even when you restrict it to whether Congress was informed. The completeness and accuracy of the briefings is the issue.
...should have been "those are orthogonal categories." Or perhaps "those aren't exclusive categories."
Something got garbled between brain and keyboard.
Democratic regime? What are you smoking? The United States is a Federalist Republic
Uh, those aren't orthogonal categories.
The US is a representative democracy (government authority is exercised in practice by officials elected by and theoretically accountable to the people through a system established in law, or by persons appointed by people so elected), and a federal (organized as an association of smaller constituent governments) republic (system of government not headed by a monarch).
Nonsense. You're forgetting that part of the people's will is that their government act to do things dealing with security, especially needed against organizations and individuals who have said that they'll seek to kill US citizens and harm the economy, have actually done so more than once, and are saying, right now, that they are actively seeking to do more of the same.
Nonsense yourself. You are forgetting that part of the people's will is that their government not act to restrict the free flow of information, and that they have expressed that they consider that will to be paramount (hence, in the US, its Constitutional character), whereas the expressions of the aspect of the popular will you refer to are distinctly and expressly subordinate.
So, given that there is at least some appropriate, tangible activity for the counter-terrorism types to work on, and for the defense agencies to be working on... is it your contention that nothing they do should be kept out of general public info-circulation?
Nothing that they do outside of the powers that they have been granted in accordance with the law should be, to be sure; nor, in a similar, overlapping, but distinct category, should anything be kept out of the general public sphere that requires those officials to exceed the powers that they have been granted under law in order to keep the secret.
Personally, I don't think that, say, some North Korean agent working in South Korea should have ready access to the surveilance that we're using to track ships full of North Korean drugs, missiles, and counterfeit currency.
That's neither here nor there. We were talking about the false distinction between "leakers" and "whistleblowers" when discussing to whom they report official misconduct.
And I don't think that someone who suddenly decides that Kim Jong Il is a Really Swell Guy should be considered a "whistleblower" when the programs aimed at monitoring that or a similarly troublesome organization are blabbed to the NYT to score political points.
Inasmuch as there is a valid distinction between that and whistleblowing, it has nothing to do with who the reporting is to, but what the reporting is about (not wrongdoing), and, to a lesser extent, what the motivation is (not to report wrongdoing, but to advance a pro-Kim Jong Il agenda.)
Such a "report" wouldn't be whistleblowing no matter who it was reported to.
Who cares if the "the public" is the ultimate arbitor of what's right/wrong?
Well, clearly, you and the Bush Administration do not.
We elect people and have long-standing policies that happen to require a certain amount of secrecy in the interests of critical jobs.
Yes, we do. And there are limits on the degree of secrecy we choose to allow; we allow classification for certain purposes with certain determinations, but expressly forbid it to conceal illegality.
Revealing that those restrictions have been violated is a public service.
If you don't like the fact that secrecy is part of the mission, elect someone who promises to have no secrets.
I'm not against secrecy. I'm against the bogus argument that revealing information concerning official misconduct to the public through the media is somehow not "whistleblowing".
Just like Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the NSA activity years ago, senior members of both parties in the house and senate are, and always have been well aware of the programs that they fund.
Relevant to the NSA programs, members of both parties have said, after each of the major public revelations, that what they discovered in those revelations and subsequent briefings did not match what they had been told in the prior briefings. So the "they were briefed" argument hardly flies, since the briefings were, though politicians will rarely put it
Well, I personally voted against those I had a choice on that are most involved in this kind of problem in the US, and I didn't get any vote on the ones in the topic of the article. But most of even the worst in the US (and I would assume the same is true in Britain, though I don't follow their campaigns as well) claim that while they will vigorously go after wrongdoers, they will also scrupulously respect and defend established freedoms.
Of course, in the end, they tend to be not all that effective against the wrongdoers, while vigorously attacking established freedoms. And, I'll agree, people need to do better at seeing through the rhetoric.
That's a nice idea but shouldn't they say... go through more appropriate channels first?
What more "appropriate channels" are there than making information of official wrongdoing available to those ultimately responsible for directing the government in a democratic regime?
...the public is the ultimate authority, so there is no difference between revealing information to the public and revealing it to the authorities.
The idea that there is a difference is a relic of the idea of government by a king whose authority came from some combination of divine grant, parentage, etc., and had nothing to do with the will of the people.
No, in democracies you vote your rights away rather than having them capriciously taken away.
No, in democracies (at least of the representative kind), you vote for people who promise to safeguard your liberties, and then go off and take your rights away capriciously, anyway.
Your faith in the Supreme Court is touching, though not necessarily justified; I can quite easily see the Court finding it within Commerce Clause powers to prohibit the use of encryption over any FCC-regulated network (i.e., pretty much everything the "internet" travels over) without providing access keys to law enforcement.
And, no, "encryption keys" are not explicitly covered by the Fourth Amendment, or the Fifth, so it is certainly (to me, though likely not to a lot of "originalists" on the federal courts) to interpret protection of encryption keys as being within the scope of the "papers and effects" of the Fourth Amendment, and within the protection of the self-incrimination provisions of the Fifth.
Maybe they do, and this serves as a way to indirectly outlaw a whole host of encryption technologies (at least when used by private individuals, rather than the government).
Of course, its quite likely that if the UK is like every other country, the law would be selectively enforced. They wouldn't go after everyone using technology that made the mandatory reporting impractical, but if law enforcement got in in their mind that you were guilty of something else (whether another crime or just doing something not-illegal that law enforcement authorities don't like), they'd use your use of such technology, and the fact that it made you guilty of a chargeable offense, as a lever or as a fallback charge.
Allow their agents (law enforcement) to spy on you, record everything you do online or say over the phone
You know all that NSA domestic spying? You do realize that the only part of it that the government is doing is collecting and analyzing, much of it with commercially available gear, installed at telco sites, not by coercive arrangement but with the full cooperation of the telcos?
All stuff that the telcos have the power to do on their own.
Of course, much of the stuff you list the law, by its terms, prohibits both the government and corporations from doing, though the government (or, as in this case, corporations) retain the power to do it in practice whatever the law says.
And, on another level, its improper to consider them separately, anyway. Corporations are, after all, creations of the government, for the express purpose of protecting a special class (stockholders) from legal accountability for the wrongs done by those stockholders agents in the course of using those stockholders resources, with the stockholders permission, to advance the stockholders interest. Corporations aren't a distinct, independent thing from the government.
The myth that corporations are "private" is just a convenient excuse to argue against them being publicly accountable while their entire existence is a massive government program of systematic subsidy to their owners.
The language is an attempt to parallel the "offensive to prevailing community standards, devoid of artistic, scientific, etc., value, and appealing to a prurient interest in sex" legal standard for pornography as closely as possible, in hopes of (when it is challenged) getting a court to agree that a giant unwritten (in the text of the Constitution) exception to the First Amendment exists regarding violent material that is parallel to the one courts have previously found with regard to pornography.
You are correct in stating what the potential problem is. But I have yet to see anything which makes me think that goverment intervention is needed to prevent that from happening. Market forces will keep ISPs in line. If an ISP starts throtling Wikipedia, then users will switch ISP.
In many areas, there are only one or two high-speed ISPs, and there are substantial barriers to entry. But even where that is not the case, the problem exists that it may not be your ISP, it may be one (or, more likely, all) of the major network providers. Even if you've got some local high-speed ISP that doesn't throttle, say, Google, if all of the major telcos start getting flaky with Google's packets when they travel across their networks, and if your ISP doesn't happen to own cable that directly connects to Google's provider, you are screwed. You aren't getting Google, and switching ISPs won't likely help.
And that's what the telcos want to do -- use their power over the network lines to destroy existing and other new providers of services they'd like to monopolize. Its classic leveraging of existing regional monopolies to other markets, on a grand scale.
I connect to the internet through an ISP (ATT) who charges me different rates depending on how fast I want to go. I decide whether faster down/up load rates are worth the extra dollars to me. From ATT's perspective, I'm consuming so much of a limited resource and they're charging me for doing so.
Other than scale, how is this different than Google or Yahoo? If they want to go fast (and it's probably in their financial interest to do so), they'll pay. If they're consuming more of a limited resource, why shouldn't they pay more?
Um, they do pay more. Oodles more than you do. Net neutrality isn't about not paying for bandwidth, its about this: Lets say you have an ISP (we'll call it "Comcast"). Lets say that Google has an ISP, let's call ("AT&T"). Let's say, for illustration's sake, that Comcast's network doesn't directly connect to AT&T's network, but they both connect to another backbone provider (we'll say "Verizon"). So the connection from you to Google looks something like this --
You Comcast Verizon AT&T Google
Currently, you pay Comcast for a certain level of bandwidth in each direction, Google pays AT&T for a certain level of bandwidth in each direction, and Comcast and AT&T each have an agreement with Verizon covering the bandwidth of their users being transferred, in each direction, over Verizon's network, which instead of cash is likely an in-kind ("I'll carry your users packets, you'll carry mine") agreement. Every bit of bandwidth is paid for, in cash or in-kind, on every network that carries it, and he who asks for more capacity is paying more for it.
What the telcos want is to allow Comcast and Verizon to demand that Google negotiate, individually, an additional payment to them each directly, or face having Google's packets dropped when travelling across their networks -- and they particularly want that ability to impose those charges on people providing services, surprisingly enough, that compete with ones where telcos already are the main provide (VoIP competing with regular telephone service) or want to dominate (like video-on-demand, or advanced portal services like Google.)
In addition, isn't there a regulatory body that makes sure the telcos aren't behaving too badly?
There is, but the debate over net neutrality is a debate about the rules that define "behaving too badly" for that body.
If it is determined, as the telcos want, that not only can they charge each other and end-users for bandwidth, but then also charge the people that connect to the network through the people that are paying the telco directly an additional charge to carry their packets, notwithstanding that the person paying to connect to the telcos network is already paying for the bandwidth (either in $$ or in-kind), then there is nothing the regulatory body can do to prevent them from using that as a tool to squelch competition, because the law will say they are allowed to do it.
Preferential for those who pay more for it, as far as I can see this will just make the price of a high speed connection go even higher?
Well, sure, that's the surface idea, in the sense that to get packets delivered at all (this is painted as "with higher priority", but since packets don't live forever, in practice this will become universal), you'll not only have to pay your direct ISP for the bandwidth, but pay every network provider over whose network your packets will travel for an additional toll for carrying your packets. Never mind how the cost of that is already built into your ISP's bandwidth charge, since interconnections are already covered by contracts which are paid for either in dollars or in-kind with agreements of "I'll take your packets, and you'll take mine."
Telcos could just raise their charges, or eliminate peering and charge bandwidth fees on interconnection, and drive these costs directly and simply down to the ISP charges where, if anywhere, they belong. The reason they aren't doing this is that this isn't really about charging for bandwidth, which they are already getting paid for. This is about establishing that a network carrier that is remote from, e.g., Google can charge a prohibitive toll to carry Google's packets across its network, thus allowing it to effectively shut-off Google from providing services that would compete with content services that that network carrier wants to provide itself. The immediate targets, from the comments the telcos have already made, are major portals (Google particularly), streaming video entertainment, and VoIP (the reason the latter is targetted is most clear -- it competes with the telcos telephone business; the others are targetted because those are markets the telcos want to get into themselves to set themselves up as content gatekeepers and to compete with the cable companies in the lucrative video-on-demand market.)
Destroying net neutrality is an attempt to leverage the telcos power over the last mile (often a regional monopoly, though the regions are growing with telco mergers) and the network backbone into the power to squelch competition by fiat in every field relying on the network.
Net Neutrality in my mind is comparable to forcing the Bells to allow other people to sell telephones that hooked into their network.
Its not merely comparable, but with the increasing popularity of VoIP, it is the exact same thing.
Which is, of course, why the telcos are so eager to find any excuse to get rid of it. They've always wanted to be free to leverage their monopoly on the wires to control everything that attached to them, and every business that relied on them, which is why they were subjected to common carrier laws and broken up to prevent in the first place.
Now they're re-merging and looking for ways to render common carrier controls irrelevant; by comparison to what is being sought here, Microsoft's market distorting power was small change. The kind of dominance the colluding telcos would exercise would be more analogous to the old Standard Oil monopoly.
Why would they? If it's going to cost them 10 million to "tear em a new one" in court, or 0.5 million in re-negotiated royalty fees, the choice is pretty clear.
Yeah, tear them a new one in court; sure, the 0.5 million might be cheaper in the short run, but giving the RIAA encouragement to sue you as a lever to renegotiate higher royalties every time you add a new feature is more expensive in the long-run.
Beat them back, hard, the first time, and they'll be more reluctant to go after you again, by showing them that its not worth their money to try to intimidate you.
The RIAA is just trying to capitalize on the technical illiteracy (overall) of judges and juries, I think.
Uh, yeah, though that seems a risky strategy since it seems to rely on the other party not being able to correct or refocus that ignorance.
(Plus, it relies on judges and juries being composed being ignorant, which isn't reliable in the first place.)
That might be a mostly-workable strategy when you are suing Joe Filesharer (who is going to cave and not take anything to trial, anyway, and if they are is going to be defending on a shoestring budget -- but attacking a feature in XMs player that probably is a big selling point to customers, well, I would expect the defense to be vigorous.)
I'm not talking about the risk of being punished by the law. I'm talking about losing all of your friends and family because they think you are a terrorist.
Well, I suppose if you have friends and family that blindly trust the government more than people they know very well, that's a risk.
Of course, the problem there is your choice of friends (family isn't a choice, except the one's you marry or adopt), not your choice of private data interchange technologies.
But, you raise a good point. To avoid the regulation, you merely need sell your non-motile nanotechnology for use only within your firm's state, and ensure that it won't be shipped or moved to another state.
Even so, there is well-established legal precedent that the Commerce Clause together with the elastic ("...necessary and proper...") clause allows Congress to regulate activity which might effect the market for interstate commerce even where the activity itself is neither "interstate" nor "commerce", including growing agricultural products (the seminal case concerned wheat, the recent reaffirmation concerned marijuana) for personal consumption.
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Whether they were briefed on the "exact" programs or not is not clear; apparently, Pelosi was briefed on something related to the program that came to light months ago, and objected to it when she was briefed on it. OTOH, since the program that has recently come to light is not the same one that was revealed months ago, its not at all clear who was briefed on what, though in order to provide political cover, the administration has released lists purporting to account the number of times particular members received some briefing relating to the NSA surveillance programs.
But the number of briefings isn't the issue, even when you restrict it to whether Congress was informed. The completeness and accuracy of the briefings is the issue.
...should have been "those are orthogonal categories." Or perhaps "those aren't exclusive categories." Something got garbled between brain and keyboard.
Nonsense yourself. You are forgetting that part of the people's will is that their government not act to restrict the free flow of information, and that they have expressed that they consider that will to be paramount (hence, in the US, its Constitutional character), whereas the expressions of the aspect of the popular will you refer to are distinctly and expressly subordinate.
Nothing that they do outside of the powers that they have been granted in accordance with the law should be, to be sure; nor, in a similar, overlapping, but distinct category, should anything be kept out of the general public sphere that requires those officials to exceed the powers that they have been granted under law in order to keep the secret.
That's neither here nor there. We were talking about the false distinction between "leakers" and "whistleblowers" when discussing to whom they report official misconduct.
Inasmuch as there is a valid distinction between that and whistleblowing, it has nothing to do with who the reporting is to, but what the reporting is about (not wrongdoing), and, to a lesser extent, what the motivation is (not to report wrongdoing, but to advance a pro-Kim Jong Il agenda.) Such a "report" wouldn't be whistleblowing no matter who it was reported to.
Well, clearly, you and the Bush Administration do not.
Yes, we do. And there are limits on the degree of secrecy we choose to allow; we allow classification for certain purposes with certain determinations, but expressly forbid it to conceal illegality. Revealing that those restrictions have been violated is a public service.
I'm not against secrecy. I'm against the bogus argument that revealing information concerning official misconduct to the public through the media is somehow not "whistleblowing".
Relevant to the NSA programs, members of both parties have said, after each of the major public revelations, that what they discovered in those revelations and subsequent briefings did not match what they had been told in the prior briefings. So the "they were briefed" argument hardly flies, since the briefings were, though politicians will rarely put it
Well, I personally voted against those I had a choice on that are most involved in this kind of problem in the US, and I didn't get any vote on the ones in the topic of the article. But most of even the worst in the US (and I would assume the same is true in Britain, though I don't follow their campaigns as well) claim that while they will vigorously go after wrongdoers, they will also scrupulously respect and defend established freedoms.
Of course, in the end, they tend to be not all that effective against the wrongdoers, while vigorously attacking established freedoms. And, I'll agree, people need to do better at seeing through the rhetoric.
What more "appropriate channels" are there than making information of official wrongdoing available to those ultimately responsible for directing the government in a democratic regime?
...open source?
...the public is the ultimate authority, so there is no difference between revealing information to the public and revealing it to the authorities.
The idea that there is a difference is a relic of the idea of government by a king whose authority came from some combination of divine grant, parentage, etc., and had nothing to do with the will of the people.
No, in democracies (at least of the representative kind), you vote for people who promise to safeguard your liberties, and then go off and take your rights away capriciously, anyway.
Catching up? That's so unfair. Its not like the British are newcomers at this -- if they hadn't done it first, there likely wouldn't be a US.
Your faith in the Supreme Court is touching, though not necessarily justified; I can quite easily see the Court finding it within Commerce Clause powers to prohibit the use of encryption over any FCC-regulated network (i.e., pretty much everything the "internet" travels over) without providing access keys to law enforcement. And, no, "encryption keys" are not explicitly covered by the Fourth Amendment, or the Fifth, so it is certainly (to me, though likely not to a lot of "originalists" on the federal courts) to interpret protection of encryption keys as being within the scope of the "papers and effects" of the Fourth Amendment, and within the protection of the self-incrimination provisions of the Fifth.
Maybe they do, and this serves as a way to indirectly outlaw a whole host of encryption technologies (at least when used by private individuals, rather than the government).
Of course, its quite likely that if the UK is like every other country, the law would be selectively enforced. They wouldn't go after everyone using technology that made the mandatory reporting impractical, but if law enforcement got in in their mind that you were guilty of something else (whether another crime or just doing something not-illegal that law enforcement authorities don't like), they'd use your use of such technology, and the fact that it made you guilty of a chargeable offense, as a lever or as a fallback charge.
You know all that NSA domestic spying? You do realize that the only part of it that the government is doing is collecting and analyzing, much of it with commercially available gear, installed at telco sites, not by coercive arrangement but with the full cooperation of the telcos?
All stuff that the telcos have the power to do on their own.
Of course, much of the stuff you list the law, by its terms, prohibits both the government and corporations from doing, though the government (or, as in this case, corporations) retain the power to do it in practice whatever the law says.
And, on another level, its improper to consider them separately, anyway. Corporations are, after all, creations of the government, for the express purpose of protecting a special class (stockholders) from legal accountability for the wrongs done by those stockholders agents in the course of using those stockholders resources, with the stockholders permission, to advance the stockholders interest. Corporations aren't a distinct, independent thing from the government.
The myth that corporations are "private" is just a convenient excuse to argue against them being publicly accountable while their entire existence is a massive government program of systematic subsidy to their owners.
The language is an attempt to parallel the "offensive to prevailing community standards, devoid of artistic, scientific, etc., value, and appealing to a prurient interest in sex" legal standard for pornography as closely as possible, in hopes of (when it is challenged) getting a court to agree that a giant unwritten (in the text of the Constitution) exception to the First Amendment exists regarding violent material that is parallel to the one courts have previously found with regard to pornography.
In many areas, there are only one or two high-speed ISPs, and there are substantial barriers to entry. But even where that is not the case, the problem exists that it may not be your ISP, it may be one (or, more likely, all) of the major network providers. Even if you've got some local high-speed ISP that doesn't throttle, say, Google, if all of the major telcos start getting flaky with Google's packets when they travel across their networks, and if your ISP doesn't happen to own cable that directly connects to Google's provider, you are screwed. You aren't getting Google, and switching ISPs won't likely help.
And that's what the telcos want to do -- use their power over the network lines to destroy existing and other new providers of services they'd like to monopolize. Its classic leveraging of existing regional monopolies to other markets, on a grand scale.
Um, they do pay more. Oodles more than you do. Net neutrality isn't about not paying for bandwidth, its about this: Lets say you have an ISP (we'll call it "Comcast"). Lets say that Google has an ISP, let's call ("AT&T"). Let's say, for illustration's sake, that Comcast's network doesn't directly connect to AT&T's network, but they both connect to another backbone provider (we'll say "Verizon"). So the connection from you to Google looks something like this --
You Comcast Verizon AT&T Google
Currently, you pay Comcast for a certain level of bandwidth in each direction, Google pays AT&T for a certain level of bandwidth in each direction, and Comcast and AT&T each have an agreement with Verizon covering the bandwidth of their users being transferred, in each direction, over Verizon's network, which instead of cash is likely an in-kind ("I'll carry your users packets, you'll carry mine") agreement. Every bit of bandwidth is paid for, in cash or in-kind, on every network that carries it, and he who asks for more capacity is paying more for it.
What the telcos want is to allow Comcast and Verizon to demand that Google negotiate, individually, an additional payment to them each directly, or face having Google's packets dropped when travelling across their networks -- and they particularly want that ability to impose those charges on people providing services, surprisingly enough, that compete with ones where telcos already are the main provide (VoIP competing with regular telephone service) or want to dominate (like video-on-demand, or advanced portal services like Google.)
There is, but the debate over net neutrality is a debate about the rules that define "behaving too badly" for that body.
If it is determined, as the telcos want, that not only can they charge each other and end-users for bandwidth, but then also charge the people that connect to the network through the people that are paying the telco directly an additional charge to carry their packets, notwithstanding that the person paying to connect to the telcos network is already paying for the bandwidth (either in $$ or in-kind), then there is nothing the regulatory body can do to prevent them from using that as a tool to squelch competition, because the law will say they are allowed to do it.
Well, sure, that's the surface idea, in the sense that to get packets delivered at all (this is painted as "with higher priority", but since packets don't live forever, in practice this will become universal), you'll not only have to pay your direct ISP for the bandwidth, but pay every network provider over whose network your packets will travel for an additional toll for carrying your packets. Never mind how the cost of that is already built into your ISP's bandwidth charge, since interconnections are already covered by contracts which are paid for either in dollars or in-kind with agreements of "I'll take your packets, and you'll take mine."
Telcos could just raise their charges, or eliminate peering and charge bandwidth fees on interconnection, and drive these costs directly and simply down to the ISP charges where, if anywhere, they belong. The reason they aren't doing this is that this isn't really about charging for bandwidth, which they are already getting paid for. This is about establishing that a network carrier that is remote from, e.g., Google can charge a prohibitive toll to carry Google's packets across its network, thus allowing it to effectively shut-off Google from providing services that would compete with content services that that network carrier wants to provide itself. The immediate targets, from the comments the telcos have already made, are major portals (Google particularly), streaming video entertainment, and VoIP (the reason the latter is targetted is most clear -- it competes with the telcos telephone business; the others are targetted because those are markets the telcos want to get into themselves to set themselves up as content gatekeepers and to compete with the cable companies in the lucrative video-on-demand market.)
Destroying net neutrality is an attempt to leverage the telcos power over the last mile (often a regional monopoly, though the regions are growing with telco mergers) and the network backbone into the power to squelch competition by fiat in every field relying on the network.
Its not merely comparable, but with the increasing popularity of VoIP, it is the exact same thing.
Which is, of course, why the telcos are so eager to find any excuse to get rid of it. They've always wanted to be free to leverage their monopoly on the wires to control everything that attached to them, and every business that relied on them, which is why they were subjected to common carrier laws and broken up to prevent in the first place.
Now they're re-merging and looking for ways to render common carrier controls irrelevant; by comparison to what is being sought here, Microsoft's market distorting power was small change. The kind of dominance the colluding telcos would exercise would be more analogous to the old Standard Oil monopoly.
Yeah, tear them a new one in court; sure, the 0.5 million might be cheaper in the short run, but giving the RIAA encouragement to sue you as a lever to renegotiate higher royalties every time you add a new feature is more expensive in the long-run.
Beat them back, hard, the first time, and they'll be more reluctant to go after you again, by showing them that its not worth their money to try to intimidate you.
Well, I suppose if you have friends and family that blindly trust the government more than people they know very well, that's a risk.
Of course, the problem there is your choice of friends (family isn't a choice, except the one's you marry or adopt), not your choice of private data interchange technologies.
Even so, there is well-established legal precedent that the Commerce Clause together with the elastic ("...necessary and proper...") clause allows Congress to regulate activity which might effect the market for interstate commerce even where the activity itself is neither "interstate" nor "commerce", including growing agricultural products (the seminal case concerned wheat, the recent reaffirmation concerned marijuana) for personal consumption.