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Why is my government delivering porno mags and religious pamphlets to my mailbox?

The government being in the delivery business is nothing new. Historically, it has worked out for the better more often than not.




So the premise is then any government infra to provide broadband must come with equally stringent protections on monitoring the content, similar to how government infra to provide deliveries has warrant requirements to inspect those deliveries.

However, we know that government policy is to record all meta-data, forever, without a warrant. HTTP/2 can't come fast enough, but even that doesn't really hide enough meta-data to trust the government with the pipe. E.g. You can tell fairly well what static pages on a domain someone is visiting by simply correlating the size of the response packets.

Of course, they are already doing all of this already, so maybe the ship has sailed... I think the best model is that the government provides the fiber, the L2 and above service is provided by a private entity. It certainly doesn't do much to prevent mass-collection or censorship, but it's marginally better than the Fed actually providing Layer 2.




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