Seems like you prefer bursting in to some KFC's waving you dick around just to make a point, don't you?

That's not how it works... that's not how any of this works!

Network Address Translation, do you speak it?

Level3 and Cogent won't die anytime soon just because they're international companies running inter-continental.links, providing service for a pile of financial institutions directly. On the other side, If something like Verizon, AT&T or even Comcast will drop itself into the void, the rest or the world won't suffer anyhow. The real reason behing the show is that Verizon, AT&T and Comcast doesn't want to be "the pipe". They'll rather provide the service themselves, but sloppy management doing the worse. I'd recommend Level3 and Cogent to excommunicate those "5 out of 6" without hesitating.

As someone into the business, there's only two prerequisites (concerning surveillance) to operate as an ISP in Russia. The first one is that you must (by the law) to store your ISP's netflow for 2 years, and to provide information for a) specific user (given by First + Last name) or b) by the IP address involved, to a) police, b) FSB or c) court, when they wanted to. And the second one, is that ISP required (by the law) to install surveillance equipment, sufficent enough to capture all the traffic of ISP's very own local clients (not the transit ones). That equipment is called "SORM" which means something like "support of investigation operations". That equipment is a bulk storage that is filled with data from selected customer IP when configured to. Equipment is controlled from local FSB office, using only E1 (smth like DS1) control channel. There's no bulk channel between ISP and FSB office because there's no bulk money at local government to pay to ISP for that. When they think they had gathered enough data. for specific subject, they can use this captured data from the SORM storage in the court. With the current ISP traffic plans, that storage can only held smth like 2hrs of all client's traffic captured simultaneously. Could you consider this as a "massive surveillance"?