Nikolaos, you have no idea how deep into the details of technological design government regulation of telecommunications industry machinery extends. The part of the market you don't discuss, and which is not strongly documented outside the industry and the segment of academia that studies network traffic engineering, is the "heavy iron" of telecomms: the routers. You mention one Cisco box and one agreement to assist tapping, but that's trivial. Network operators buy and operate hundreds of thousands of routers that perform not just all the switching in the net, but all the real-time monitoring of all the switching in the net. Those boxes not only are designed to make it possible for the network operator to monitor operations and the law enforcement operator to monitor communications, they are also built to resist intrusion by other parties under extremely exacting government regulatory standards that affect design decisions from the hardware on up. Those regulatory standards are also implemented, largely, through government acquisition controls, which you could consider "voluntary" standards if you like, but which are dominant nonetheless.

Maybe you are right that we don't want all this interpenetration of government and private telecomms, but someone will be running those big routers, and I do want both the parts that allow the routers to be monitored comprehensively by whoever is operating them, and I also want all the technological overkill that goes into making it as hard as humanly possible to sneak any code into those routers. The reality that national governments are going to force their way into those routers from a technological perspective is not something I can prevent technologically: here my defense is technology further out to the edge of the net, where I can encrypt my own traffic and a snowstorm of everyone's encrypted traffic can proceed as I describe in So Much for Savages. Oh, and there's the rule of law.

But free technology has its limits. It's all very heartwarming to attribute the failure of Clipper to the success of PGP, but I think that's not really what happened. I think Clipper failed because the US Govt realized that it was preparing to assure insecurity for its own communications, and it didn't want to do that.