Re: Proof
The technical side of this debate seems to revolve around 'accountability'. Without it no control or policing of compliance can ever be succesful... just as it actual governance cannot be succesful without effect and meaningfully appropriate sanctions. Ultimately a job for the ICC's jurisdiction.... and now we start to see why the US won't sign up to it!!
Pardon my rusty IP packet knowledge (c.1998) but it seems to me that we will get nowhere unless IP packet architecture is split into a virtual and a 'real' (can't use 'physical' in this context) layer. A variable-length virtual packet concept (with current sequence numbering rules) mapped across multiple fixed-length packets which are numbered sequentially within the 'domain' of the virtual packet they carry.
Armed with that we can then infinitely collect a 'hop history' list with arrival and despatch timestamps along the whole route of every packet at every device (including caches). The 'expanded hop count' history needs to list the receiving and the despatch MAC ID's of every bit of kit it hits along the way.
We then require public access to a human readable, global registration DB of every MAC-ID, its location (down to sub-frame mounting?), its unequivocal accountable ownership and its purpose. The DB could be maintained and distributed co-resident with every DNS... perhaps as a UN ICC-owned and managed resource.. post-Security Council 'Permanent Member veto' era I would think... and you simply don't get on the Internet if your country is not signed up to all forms of international accountability. That will sort out the current business models of Google, M$, Apple.... and hobble the NSA (aka. Globalisation Protection Services Inc.)
If you cannot establish accountability and sanction the wrong-doers, in terms of what ever rules you settle on, then we are all wasting our time and the robber-baron era of human history will continue for another 10,000 years....
Biting the hand that feeds IT
