The major Internet Exchange in Europe (DE-CIX) and many others are privately operated. The goverment gave up control over almost all the lines in the 1990ies. Currently the traffic at DE-CIX is peaking around 9.1 Terabits per second and at least a reserve capacity of 25% is what they managed to sustain over decades
(COVID-19 FAQ).

Maybe your Internet is not fast enough to transmit information but only rumors and accusations.

Unfortunately the press release is a little short on details. Here is the link to the actual article (paywalled):

"1.25 Gbit/s Visible Light WDM Link based on DMT Modulation of a Single RGB LED Luminary", opticsinfobase.org

Especially sensitive devices such as medical and safety relevant devices should not be a black box where it is illegal to look into the inner workings. While third-party liability is nice this is still just based on trust and not on tests. My trust into these system would increase quite a bit if a hacker plays around with a utility meter and finds no obvious vulnerability.

I want all my devices unlocked, the liability can be linked to a tamperproof soft/hardware seal as it is already done today. This is fine with me, I do not expect the manufacturer to be liable if I took it apart, hacked it and reassembled it but I do not see any advantage in making hacking illegal.

The idea to reproduce important results is good and is part of the scientific method. In practice this is much harder to accomplish due to several constraints. I can only speak for my field but I think this applies to other fields as well that the reproduction is hard by itself.

This leads us to a bunch of problems. If it takes a graduate student a year to collect a data set on a custom made machine that is expensive and time consuming who has the resources to reproduce the results? In most branches we are limited by the available personnel. It is hard to imagine giving someone the task of 'just' reproducing someone else's result, as this does not generate high-impact publications nor can be used for grant applications.

The thought behind this would benefit the scientific progress, especially to weed out questionable results that can lead you far off track but someone needs to do it. And it better not be me, as I need time for my own research to publish new results. Any reviewer always asks him/herself whether this is really an achievement that it is worth publishing, which reviewer would accept a paper stating "We reproduced X and did not find any deviations from the already published results" ?

This is exactly what someone would come up with as some kind of "challenge" where the outcome is so obviously biased.

In none of these videos the speed of any smartphone or operating system is on the test. It is the speed of the individual people using their phones. I tried some of these challenges, like a local search for a restaurant. After a bit of practice I could get an answer on my 3 year old and slow smartphone after 6 seconds. From those 6 seconds I spend about 1 second waiting for my phone, the rest is the network connection and my typing speed.
So any improvement on the hardware or software side can only influence the 1 second. Other than that the phone has to guess what I think to prevent the slow typing or speech recognition part.
My first try took 20 seconds as I missed a few shortcuts and this is how you can beat almost everybody by claiming to have a faster phone when you just know exactly what to touch/type.

I agree that in-sourcing can be cheaper as you do not have to pay for overhead and profit. Your argument relies on one premise, which is completely broken.

Your cost to do something is almost never their cost. So if they can get to the same result with 50% or sometimes far less due to economies of scale adding another 20% is still much cheaper than paying for in-source. Even if you in-source you have to pay for the whole infrastructure. Your email server needs a backup, UPS and staff, whereas the cost of a UPS in a large datacenter is split over millions of users.