[jff]

I'm on the same page here with you--I agree that packet radio is pretty useless for internet access. It's pretty useless for anything except talking to other amateur radio operators, and all they want to talk about is radio and, sometimes, Obama.

But that's what the amateur service is, it's people playing with radios because they think radios are cool. Because it's mostly real-time conversations, the bands aren't insanely congested; if I tried to fetch my email over an encrypted signal on the 40m band, I'm going to tie up a big chunk of the available frequencies for possibly hours on end (cough yacht owners running WINLINK cough).

You'd have to eliminate the "no commercial business" rule too, because fetching your mining operation's email looks pretty similar to browsing ham forums when everything is encrypted.