"It's too complicated and expensive for government to perform mass data collection & tracking if they have to deal with thousands of small mom-&-pop ISPs."

Yes, that's why the push for regulatory barriers happened in the first place. I'm not saying it *will* be undone, just that it *could* be.

Why is it not possible to break the monopolies? Just stop treating ISPs as utilities, lower the artificial barriers to entry, and we'll have an explosion of local ISPs just like we had back in the old days, before we erected a regulatory wall to stop mom-and-pop internet providers and force us into these monopolies.

This is a common misconception - frogs don't stay in boiling water, even if it's heated slowly. The only time that a frog will not jump out of even a slowly-heated pot is when the sides are too steep. I guess frogs are smarter than humans, in a lot of ways.

Depends on what the balloon is made out of, now doesn't it? Where is the video of you performing this experiment, btw? Pics or it didn't happen.

They will in vacuum. Helium is lighter than air. It is not an anti-gravity gas.

Yes, so they can put in 30 or 40 500k flash ads that change hourly so you can't cache them. Great idea! I have a better one: How about they provide the service that they're getting paid to provide? If they can't do it, maybe they should have thought about that before they went and offered it.