>Another big driving force towards secrecy is the good ol' American legal system. If an ISP is completely open about its downtime, they're wide open to class-action lawsuits claiming "ISP X's service was down Y% of last month, therefore each customer is entitled to refund $Z". This is basically a case of lawyers getting paid to pretend to be virgins ;-)

If there's anything left of the American way of life, it's the areas where lawyers don't have much interest, aka the virgin areas. The rest is a mess.

Virgin lawyers? "In the elbow", we'd say back home.