may be explained by their recent climb in users. Only 2% of all Swedes were connected to the internet in 1995 but at last count in 2012, 89% had broadband access. This was due in large part once again to the active Swedish government introducing regulatory provisions to promote competition among internet service providers. These regulations helped grow web infrastructure and forced prices below the European average. For copyright laws, Sweden was the birthplace of the Pirate Bay, an infamous file-sharing website. File sharing has been illegal in Sweden since it was developed, however, there was never any real fear of being persecuted for the crime until 2009 when the Swedish Parliament was the first in the European Union to pass the intellectual property rights directive. This directive persuaded internet service providers to announce the identity of suspected violators. Sweden also has its infamous centralized block list. The list is generated by authorities and was originally crafted to eliminate sites hosting child pornography. However, there is no legal way to appeal a site that ends up on the list and as a result, many non-child pornography sites have been blacklisted. Sweden's government enjoys a high level of trust from their citizens. Without this trust, many of these regulations would not be possible and thus many of these regulations may only be feasible in the Swedish context. Internet privacy in the United States Andrew Grove, co-founder and former CEO of Intel Corporation, offered his thoughts on internet privacy in an interview published in May 2000: More than two decades later, Susan Ariel Aaronson, director of the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub at George Washington University observed, in 2022, that: Overview With the Republicans in control of all three branches of the U.S. government, lobbyists for internet service providers (ISPs) and tech firms persuaded lawmakers to dismantle regulations to protect privacy which had been made during the Obama administration. These FCC rules had required ISPs to get "explicit consent" before gathering and selling their private internet information, such as the consumers' browsing histories, locations of businesses visited and applications used. Trade groups wanted to be able to sell this information for profit. Lobbyists persuaded Republican senator Jeff Flake and Republican representative Marsha Blackburn to sponsor legislation to dismantle internet privacy rules; Flake received $22,700 in donations and Blackburn received $20,500 in donations from these trade groups. On March 23, 2017, abolition