The problem is centralization is more convenient for consumers. You can easily control your doorbell, your garage door, your security cameras with 1 app, and everything just works.
Open source and decentralized solutions need to be just as convenient and cheaper than centralized ones for consumers to choose them.
You're looking at America in 2026 and concluding we want to give the state more control over private lives?
You dropped an adjective: wealthy
The 17th amendment is a little over 100 years old.
People need to stop treating the US constitution as this "mythical" thing rather than the reality of it being a very undemocratic document that is highly resistant to change.
Luckily the house can be expanded with a simple majority IN the house, one way to truly combat this.
Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions describes the difference well.
What brought the popularity of gmail was the huge space provided which at the time felt infinite. I still remember the counter that was showing the size increasing seemingly indefinitely.
I see this as a downside. Native email clients are much faster and a far better UX than a Web inbox. It's also pretty much required if you juggle multiple accounts.
Getting away from American tech has become an actual national security issue.
Ideally you would still have private enterprise create alternatives, but it’s easy to imagine that email, social media will simply be built for citizens by their government.
There’s more incentives than pure profit - Government seems capable enough to attract people when it comes to cyber weapons.
Governments aren’t currently making these tools, because until last year, private enterprise was good enough. It still is, minus the dependency on America and its political climate.
Personally - The issue isn’t engineer availability or salary, but committee based decision making.
We need to move in the right direction, not get paralysis in the status quo because of high profile edge cases.
No matter what there will always be warrants and wire taps. The goal is to get away from the "free flow" of information.
In most cases there can’t be movement in this direction and to the degree there can be, it isn’t enough.
Most people don't have much of a disposable income.
...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.
<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>
That's one of the big hidden factors driving the ad/surveillance economy: people's purchasing power just isn't what it used to be, while at the same time they're expected to be paying regularly for more things than ever before (home broadband, mobile phone plans, etc).
- regulate the crap out of surveillance capitalism.
- enforce laws on the books
- Break up firms
Tech used to have a leg to stand on in the face of government over reach. Today, tech firms have largely adapted to the incentives that actually make themselves known every quarter.
Customer support, content moderation, compliance are avoided, and lobbying argues that if you dont let tech it easy, your economy wont innovate. Except enshittification is the term to describe how extractive mature tech markets become.
I am all for more subscription models, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing our hands up and ignoring the many changes that can better align the current incentives.