Comment by pdimitar

I don't disagree with what you are saying but that ship has sailed decades ago.

Nobody in the tech area did anything meaningful to keep them at bay, like make a fully free search engine where it's prohibited by an actual law in an actual country to introduce ads or move data out of the data center, etc.

We were all too happy to just get the freebies. The bill comes due, always, though. And a bill is coming for several years now, on many different fronts.

Where are the truly P2P, end-to-end encrypted and decentralized mainstream internet services? Everyone is in Telegram or Whatsapp, some are in Signal. Every company chat is either in Slack or Teams. To have a custom email you need to convince Google and Microsoft not to mark your emails as spam... imagine that.

Again, the ship has sailed, long long time ago. Nobody did anything [powerful / meaningful] to stop it.