I don't think there has ever been a perfect time but I also think there has been an ever increasing weakness in the governments desire/ability to enforce regulation roughly since that time period.

I mean the reconstitution of AT&T was one of the IMO the biggest middle fingers to the public I've seen. It was broken up because it was a bad actor and now its back again as a worse than ever bad actor. That was kind my wake up call. I'm sure there is worse though that I don't remember because it was not tech related.

I could be wrong I'm not a huge politics person. Either way I don't think any response to me invalidates my opinion that the current government would not do a better job than cloudflare currently is.