> No other network is supposed to be "ours". Roads, telephones, mobile networks and so on.
It may not be your opinion that they are supposed to be "ours", but the opinion that they are or should be is certainly fairly common, though the idea of what it means for them to be "ours" vary from an acceptance of current regulatory regimes to a wanting extensive decentralisation of control.
But the internet is special in this respect in that it currently is still reasonably outside of the control of both governments and private entities. That is not just due to history but also due to the nature of the network: It is a "meta network" layered on top of a bunch of physical networks, but that can be layered on top of "anything" that can move packets from one addressable note to another. It takes a lot to enforce control if you at the same time want people to be able to exchange information: Unless you are going to do complicated cryptoanalysis of every single packet passing through the system, people can establish their own new layers on top.
Tor, for example, is just an early precursor to what we can expect to see popping up, since experimenting with layering is so easy (you can set up your own "proto VPN" with a few dozen lines of shell script on many OS's), and people have incentives to avoid control.
It may not be your opinion that they are supposed to be "ours", but the opinion that they are or should be is certainly fairly common, though the idea of what it means for them to be "ours" vary from an acceptance of current regulatory regimes to a wanting extensive decentralisation of control.
But the internet is special in this respect in that it currently is still reasonably outside of the control of both governments and private entities. That is not just due to history but also due to the nature of the network: It is a "meta network" layered on top of a bunch of physical networks, but that can be layered on top of "anything" that can move packets from one addressable note to another. It takes a lot to enforce control if you at the same time want people to be able to exchange information: Unless you are going to do complicated cryptoanalysis of every single packet passing through the system, people can establish their own new layers on top.
Tor, for example, is just an early precursor to what we can expect to see popping up, since experimenting with layering is so easy (you can set up your own "proto VPN" with a few dozen lines of shell script on many OS's), and people have incentives to avoid control.