Do correct me if I'm wrong: but the push to HTTPS was mostly for its resistance to MITM attacks from bad-behaving ISPs and public WiFi, no? I really struggle to

Do correct me if I'm wrong: but the push to HTTPS was mostly for its resistance to MITM attacks from bad-behaving ISPs and public WiFi, no? I really struggle to believe that the most powerful nation-state in the world would not be able to get certificates from certificate authorities overwhelmingly also hosted in the States. And besides, most information relevant to the government is just who's connecting to what, which is necessarily done unencrypted (via DNS or otherwise). Directly answering your question: because phone companies are natural monopolies, and have strong incentives to prevent any public-access provider that wouldn't need unique identifiers tied to billing information from coming in. Location tracking is a direct consequence of cell towers only having a limited range: and because telcos have no real competitors, there's no way a privacy-centered carrier that sells itself on not doing anything with that data can pop up. I do wish public access LTE existed in a similar form to free WiFi or municipal broadband. Or even just more municipal broadband. This article is about individual apps siphoning location data to the US government à la Tim Hortons, though, not phone providers themselves tracking users, although that also does happen.