> The organization that brought us the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the rest of the alphabet soup of “security” bureaucracies that spy on us arbitrarily?
Which origination do you think that is? you think they all came from the same place? Every one of these agencies came into existence under very different circumstances at different times and they fall under different branches and operate in different areas. Do you mean "government" in general?
Yes, it's a horrible thing that these agencies are being used to spy on all American citizens in violation of our freedoms, but that fact doesn't mean that we shouldn't allow any government agency anywhere enforce regulations. How that does that make any sense at all? You could say the same for literally anything. "Who should regulate the amount of lead in our drinking water? The organization that brought us the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the rest of the alphabet soup of “security” bureaucracies that spy on us arbitrarily?"
> Strong regulation could easily worsen the problem, as it can lead to a ratcheting up of the regulatory burden until only mega corps like Apple and Google could afford to make phones, and upstarts like Purism and Pinephone get squeezed out.
It literally couldn't worsen the problem of our privacy being violated and used against us by cell phone companies. If it's illegal for Google to do it, and we had regular independent verification that they were not violating those laws, than it wouldn't matter if the only cell phones that existed on the whole of Earth were made by Google. Google still wouldn't be doing the bad thing we're trying to stop.
Yes, I'd prefer to have more choices but there's zero requirement that regulations make it prohibitively expensive for any company even an upstart. In fact, because this would be regulation against collecting, securing, maintaining, analyzing, marketing, and selling our personal data it'd actually save companies tons of money since they'd no longer be dong any of those things. Established companies who are currently exploiting consumers won't get to profit off of them as they are currently, but they will still save a lot of time and money not exploiting the public.
> How about before getting so gung ho with pointing the government gun at everyone’s head, we consider the option of rolling back the unjust regulations that already exist which give the mega corps undue government privilege (patents are a good place to start)
This isn't an either/or type of thing. There's a lot of great and important things we should be doing. This is one of them. Let's do them all.
> and encouraging (by voting with our wallets) organic alternatives to emerge, like they already are doing.
If "the market" were going to solve this problem, if it were capable of solving this problem, it would have been solved already. It's not. Until strong regulations are in place there will continue to be a very very strong perverse incentive to not solve this problem. We're coming up on 50 years of mobile phone technology and at present there are no comparable options for cell phones and mobile networks that preserve privacy. None. It's not regulations forcing Google and Apple to collect our personal data. They are choosing to do it. They could stop tomorrow if they wanted to. They don't want to. They won't stop until they are forced to stop.