I thought of the tracking and gate questions, too, when I vibed up an HF torrent service a few nights ago. (Super annoying BTW to have to download the files just to hash the parts, especially when webseeds exist.) Model owners could disable or gate torrents the same way they gate the models, and HF could still measure traffic by .torrent downloads and magnet clicks.

It's a bit like any legalization question -- the black market exists anyway, so a regulatory framework could bring at least some of it into the sunlight.