It was a pleasure! We lost nominally in the end (except in California and outside the US) but we built enough awareness to give the ISPs a fear that blatant violations would rock the boat and lead to worse outcomes for them, like more state laws or tougher agency rules when Democrats regained power. I do regret not pushing harder for federal legislation though!

On airgapped email archives, yes, the subpoena threat model is real too. That also happened to us because of some other dirty tricks by ISPs in the same campaign! Fake FCC submissions opposing net neutrality were being created with blatantly stolen user data; like, not people being tricked into singing a petition but just straight up identity theft. We documented all of this and pitched some state AGs on looking into it. New York did, which was awesome, but they ended up subpoenaing everyone including us! We were psyched about this overall of course since it was our idea, and they did end up finding out who did it which was awesome (Broadband for America, the umbrella lobbying group for the telcos) but it was a huge amount of work to comply with the subpoena. The retention limits reduced that burden. Another reason to have them!

I would also say that, if you do create an airgapped archive and store it in an appropriately paranoid way, you are likely to never ever bother to dig it out of storage before the SSD melts into uselessness. You'll miss the ocassional old email but not enough to go digging for it.