Comment by mindslight

Prohibiting (or at least restraining) the de jure government but allowing a parallel corporate de facto government to keep growing (in scope, coercion, and influence) is exactly what has happened here. It's naive to think that the de jure government can always continue to "just say no" to the parallel power structure, keeping it under control of the de jure government. Rather, eventually the corporate government gets powerful enough to overrun the traditional mechanics that keep it subservient, no matter how strong those mechanisms may be. Then the corporate government goes to work subverting, devouring, and replacing the traditional government.

If we had wanted to avoid where we are now at - staring down a full-on fascist dystopia - the surveillance industry ("tech") needed to be nipped in the bud 15+ years ago - with a GDPR-equivalent, and strong anti-trust enforcement that prohibited anti-competitive bundling [proprietary] software with [Metcalfe's law] network services. The surveillance industry's power needed to be constrained to remain in line with our assumptions of natural rights and Constitutionally-limited government.

But a lot of people were being paid a lot of money to not think too hard about the implications of what they were building. And so every time the topic came up in our communities, those on the take would shout it down with a litany of rationalizations about why such constraints were not necessary.