> This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.

Well said.

I think another area where this problem has already emerged is with public records laws.

It's one thing if records of, let's say, real estate sales are made "publicly available" by requiring interested parties to physically visit a local government building, speak in the local language to other human beings in order to politely request them, and to spend a few hours and some money in order to actually get them.

It's quite another thing if "publicly available" means that anyone anywhere can scrape those records off the web en masse and use them to target online scams at elderly homeowners halfway around the world.

Same, also in BC.

I agree with everything you write, and in principle I'd prefer just to stay on standard time forever.

However for my selfish individual interests: I work with a lot of people in Europe, and this change to permanent DST will make the time difference once hour less for 4 months a year… until the rest of the world goes this way too, at least.

Yes, I know about Tempest. My point here is that you really can't trust networks, and as they get bigger you should trust them less and less.

That's frustrating, but why are you so concerned with porting out of VoIP-based carriers?

> Google Voice is requiring ID verification now

Yep, this is a crappy change going forward :-(

However, Google Voice does not require ID verification for preexisting accounts, so this has no effect on existing users.