I think your hope is misguided. People dreamed of an Internet where sharing of information was free (as in freedom). Then DRM happened. And even if DRM cannot

I think your hope is misguided. People dreamed of an Internet where sharing of information was free (as in freedom). Then DRM happened. And even if DRM cannot be 100% reliable, being broken by design, it's reliable enough, plus in the US at least it's a felony to break it. And as years go by, we see more DRM, not less. This happens, because the practice is normalized, and because small inconveniences are taken care of (usually by monopolies winning the market—e.g. you stop complaining that alternative e-book readers don't work, when everybody is using the Kindle or the Audible apps). Similarly, for the open web — the action has been moving on mobile devices. A majority of people now consume content via mobile devices. So what do you see? More websites? Or more apps? And for all ad-blocking happening at the DNS level (e.g. Pi-hole), how long do you think it is before apps start doing DNS over HTTPS on their own, bypassing the OS's stack? This is a wack-a-mole game, and the big publishers have enough resources to push for both technical and legal changes for outlawing ad-blocking. I'm actually surprised that content blockers remained legal thus far. But the writing is on the wall IMO. --- There's also another side of this coin. I see more and more people on HN complaining that articles are submitted from publications that are setting up paywalls. People also hate paying for content. And even those that pay for content, they don't recognize what an incredible privilege it is to afford it. Either content is monetized somehow, or the only content that we get will be content created by hobbyists, in their spare time, for free, while working a regular job. Well I for one don't want a world in which the poor don't get access to online resources, or a world in which people can't make ends meet doing what they love.