The regulatory environment also played a big role in this. If you read the original telecommunications act (title I). It is wildly heavy handed on privacy. T

The regulatory environment also played a big role in this. If you read the original telecommunications act (title I). It is wildly heavy handed on privacy. The TL:DR basically you can pipe this voice data around but you may not use it and if an gov official wants it, get a warrant (even if it is a rubber stamp one). Title II broke most of that to make the internet grow. Well it succeeded doing that wildly. But now the companies are doing what is basically 'natural' for them to do. Consume what they can see. This sort of thing has happened before with telegrams, mail, and plain old telephone. Companies have seized up Title II to make this happen. For example your cell phone is not a phone. It is an internet device and covered under tittle II not I. Also we as users are somewhat to blame as we wanted 'free stuff'. We traded away our freedoms for tweets and facebook posts. There is no 'one entity' to blame here. We all share it quite equally. I have been saying this for many years now. But most of these companies are heading right into a Title III being written just for exactly what they are doing. They better get their act together or no one is going to like the outcome.