Hi Steve!
I think the person most "at risk" from legislative impact of "network operators" is the person who runs a TTN gateway. They may be a home user running one on their home broadband, or they may be an activist putting an industrial strength gateway on a tall building as part of a town-wide deployment.
Even in the current model the packets traversing the gateway are not anonymous. They have source addresses (DevAddr - either burnt-in or network allocated) and gateways will be communicating with a single TTN router on the Internet.
In your view, would it be sufficient to satisfy legislation for the gateway operator to log the time and DevAddr of each packet (as "Internet Connection Records")?
If not, what if gateways were restricted to communicating with TTN routers and brokers in the same legal jurisdiction (i.e. same country)? This would theoretically allow the spooks to discover the address of applications that the end nodes are communicating with (and hence the owner of the nodes) by demanding disclosure of the Internet Connection Records from the Router or Broker operators.
Aled