IANAL. The ham radio community needs to raise this with the FCC. This section was originally constructed a long time ago (1993?). I'm guessing it's biased this way to stop 1940's era spys from operating.
The regulations prohibit various forms of commercial use, e.g. preventing a cab company from moving its dispatch onto the 2m ham band— a reasonable policy since there is limited spectrum and commercial parties could easily overrun it: but if the traffic is encrypted how is the community management supposed to function?
Personally I'd like to see the regulations adopt special rules for highly directional or low-power limited-range signals in the SHF+ bands where there is plenty of spectrum which basically drops all the content rules beyond requiring cleartext contact information. Without competition for spectrum the balance of interests is different and it would be nice to be able to lawfully backhaul community internet access over some chunks of spectrum up at 3cm. Since no one would likely notice or care you could already use crypto in these places, so it might as well be made permitted.
The amateur radio community is not universal in their dislike for this rule. I don't personally see any way in which the rule could be removed without altering the fundamental character of the amateur radio service.
You simply should not be making transmissions in the amateur radio service that require privacy. Permitting unrestricted encryption makes that basically impossible to enforce.
I’m too lazy to look it up but I would be surprised if many of the founders of the internet where not ham operators. Again I’m being lazy about looking it up but if not specifically in writing at least in spirit I believe one of the purposes of the armature radio program has been to advance wireless communication and technology.
Right now strong encryption and authentication are where most of the efforts in the field seem to be focused. It should be at the forefront of the experimentation being done by amateur radio operators.
Not that I really have an answer to the problem of bandwidth abuse. I completely understand how this would be a problem and have no doubt that it would be abused.
Personally I'd like to see the regulations adopt special rules for highly directional or low-power limited-range signals in the SHF+ bands where there is plenty of spectrum which basically drops all the content rules beyond requiring cleartext contact information. Without competition for spectrum the balance of interests is different and it would be nice to be able to lawfully backhaul community internet access over some chunks of spectrum up at 3cm. Since no one would likely notice or care you could already use crypto in these places, so it might as well be made permitted.