It does look like the US becomes scarier every day. More and more extrajudicial powers, secret laws, restrictions on speech, unwarranted searches/wiretaps and so on. Their "war on freedom" is very successful.
As I've said before, the internet really should stop relying on the US that much. Too bad Europe and others seem to be asleep in this case. Maybe they will get it when it is too late. Having what is slowly becoming the world's only information distribution network in the hands of one government (or, any government) is a very big risk.
Sadly, I think placing 'it' in the hands of an international body like the UN or whatever wouldn't be any better. In the case of the UN, it would probably be worse (China and the US would likely veto any measure aimed at opening things up, and with more political cover to do so).
The only long-term solution that I can see if you're really interested in online freedom is to remove all the underlying infrastructure from centralized control in an irreversible way, up to the hardware level as much as is practicable (global wi-fi is probably not realistic but is a goal worth striving toward).
I suppose Tor is as good a model as any, just less visible to an end-user. It isn't enough though, and is still vulnerable.
Well, yes. The ideal situation would be to decentralize everything. Tor-like over networks could play a role in that.
But my main point is that so much is hosted on US-based (or US-owned) "cloud servers". And so much relies on US-based services like Skype, Facebook, Gmail. So that when the they pull the internet switch, for whatever reason, the whole communications infrastructure is messed up. And they can easily spy in information stored on their soil.
More and more information and communication is under control by the US. I'm having a hard seeing how we can 'pull out' of this when it becomes necessarily. I don't think we such a reliance on China.
