[hwbehrens]

What is the expectation here? That the companies would refuse to comply with an (apparently legal) governmental information request? What justification would they use?

Wire and especially Proton seem to have gone to the limits of their ability to enable their users to be anonymous, and the weak link was the user's own inclusion of the recovery address.

Obviously Apple (and Google, and Meta, and Microsoft, etc) will have more information about their users, but I don't think it's a common expectation that those kinds of services are anonymous.

If we're unhappy with the outcome here, I think it's a legislative question, not a technical one.

[sircastor]

I was just thinking about this relative to another post. I think people push companies to solve this problem because Government is slow moving, and often well-resourced interests can get traction when the average citizen cannot.

This should absolutely be solved by government. But with collective action (noisy social media, mostly) people can often have quicker effect on a company.

[im3w1l]

In my experience, a lot of people are distrustful of logical arguments about what may happen. If it has never happened, then it doesn't happen in practice - that's how they reason I suppose. This article shows that it does happen in practice.