As I've blathered on for years, business doesn't make fortunes by manufacturing product, but by manufacturing scarcity. Lumber. Water (soon!). Bandwidth.
And people: Businesses make monopolies, not governments. Businesses want to control supply, create scarcity and drive up prices and buy up their competitors so they can drive up prices again. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. The oil cartels control oil supply, Diamond controls comic book distribution, etc. Choke points *they* create by ruthlessly destroying their competition. Government can't mandate competition in the sense you can't pass a law to make sharks stop eating tuna. They persist in eating the damned tuna; it's their nature. Sometimes, as in the last 30 right-wing years, the tuna *is* the government.
Monopoly exists 'cause lack of regulation, not 'cause of it.
In cabling the US, the US businesses refused to provide service unless they had local monopoly, so the cities divvied up their territories and the cable companies rolled out. That was a business-demanded requirement, not a government-demanded one. They would not provide unless they were exclusive. The only alternative was municipal cable, which happened, but is mostly sued or otherwise driven out of business. Right now a federal law, paid for by the big cable companies, is about to make muni rollout *illegal*. You may blame government, but the businesses are buying that law.

The subject line says it all.
No. No. No.

Try spying on the US communications systems for the Russians, and see what happens when they catch you. Apparently, not OK with Americans.

It's OK If We Do It. America is the Shining City on the Hill, chosen by Providence to spread God's word and God's electronic eavesdropping to all the nations of the earth.

It's NOT OK with everyone else. And yes, they count.

Copyright, as in "intellectual property", is a notion that exploded from The Shining City on the Hill, namely Jesus's country, America. We've rammed each and every treaty down the world's throat for almost thirty years. Now that it's established, of course European copyright lords are helping seal us in with our cask of Amontlliado. But it is American in origin.

Well done, madam or sir. Exactly so.

They don't want to eliminate the internet. They want to turn it into a paid cable TV service with data for a fat extra charge. They want to own the internet, turn it into another corporate-owned asset. And they have won.

This is ME saying this, but in Betamax decision, the SCOTUS said that *even though* VCR sometimes infringed on copyrights, that the non-infringing uses outweighed the "bad" use. Yes, that makes little sense, but blame copyright laws for that. Change the laws, change the decisions.

"Is it one of those things, like sex and human organs, that you can give away for free but you can't charge money for it?"

You can't charge, either. You must remain a virgin until they license you to have sex, er, watch TV.

Um, Scalia tried that with Bush V. Gore. "Only applies to this one election." Bull.
No, it doesn't work like that, unless someone is crookedly applying law. Law is law, and they don't get to choose what the consequences of their STUPID decision is.

"Fair Use"? HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA! That was FUNNY! "Fair Use"!! Why, grampa here just peed in his Depends when he heard you mention that dead fish. Fair Use indeed. Whoo. Whee.

Those consequences were quite intended by the broadcast industry which sued Aereo. Only Scalia, amazingly, got it right when he warned they were after this endgame. Blind adherence to the tiny details of the law give us this stinking pile to live with, just as when they ruled that eternal copyright was fine as long as there was *some* time limit mentioned, even if it was a century, even if the limit would be eternally extended, as it just obviously had been.

The US writes all the treaties. Amazing how that works.