Congress was willing to set guard dogs -- paid by the government -- around anything that private industry could come up with to protect works even if those protections were excessive.
There has been a misconception -- and a helpful one -- among many government bureaucrats that the Internet is a non-geographic phenomenon. But it can be reworked to correspond to national jurisdictions and boundaries.
We need better options for securing the Internet. Instead of looking primarily for top-down government intervention, we can enlist the operators and users themselves.
Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers - and not to tell you about it.