Politics plays a role, but it's secondary to creating a secure network. Today's network and its core protocols are trivial to abuse, and the trouble lies in the

Politics plays a role, but it's secondary to creating a secure network. Today's network and its core protocols are trivial to abuse, and the trouble lies in the fact that the people that were its original creators couldn't see the future. Jon Postel created SMTP at a time when governments were more trusted to act in the interests of the people (whether this was true in practice or not), and also only ~200 hosts were connected to the internet with a total of ~20,000 people actually using the internet.[0] Nobody thought that SMTP would be used by a large chunk of the world's population, that spam would be an issue, that traffic could be sniffed and intercepted, or that governments would start programs of virtually indiscriminate en masse surveillance of the world's electronic communications. The idea of a Room 614A would have been regarded as ridiculous and excessively paranoid. Cloud services are an entirely different issue, and the issue isn't necessarily resolved politically, but by mass decentralization. Things like OwnCloud are a great starting point and people today generally have the bandwidth to run their own micro-servers at home, or, possible, if battery life improves, on their phones. Some things are impossible to decentralize, for example search, at least until technology and storage advances sufficiently that we can all host our own Google search product on our phones, and Google search becomes an app that can be paid for and downloaded, with live changes to the index being streamed to the device. It sounds absurd in today's world, but tomorrow could be different. [0] http://education.illinois.edu/wp/commercialism/history-of-the-internet.htm http://education.illinois.edu/wp/commercialism/history-of-th...