Old ways that seemed to be working, like democratic elections? I don't think so. Not anymore.
How? Governments have the monopoly on violence through their control of the police and military, and corporations bribe the governments in power to do their bidding and also control the media apparatus via which the voting population makes their democratic decisions, so you get this corrupt symbiotic relationship between the first and second estate (the government and wealthy elite private sector) to keep the third estate (common population) oppressed.
So how do you actually coordinate hundreds of millions of people towards a single goal to "fight" against and apparatus of oppression with an order of magnitude more kinetic strike, intelligence gathering and propaganda capabilities than the common folk?
People keep fantasizing about the French revolution and guillotines, but King Louis XVI didn't have Air Force One, doomsday bunkers in New Zeeland, AC-130s, Predator, Reaper and Anduril drones to protect him. The force disparity between the ruling elite and peasantry is now like that meme of hydrogen bomb versus coughing baby.
Meta, Microsoft, and Google's extensive user tracking beg to differ.
Meta, Microsoft, Google, & Apple have a profit motive for scooping up everything they can.
Every government in the world wants to do the same scooping, but their motive is "security."
These are not separate activities either. Governments are mandating the collection by corporations, so they can use that channel for their own purposes.
In practice, encrypted messaging, and more broadly the unregulated, anonymous nature of the internet is THE technology that enables this. Ukrainian refugees are essentially indistinguishable in practice from Russian operatives and pose a very real security risk. The loss of the US as a reliable ally, which in practice is the new reality, is felt here in a very real way.
I think this point is largely missed by hacker news. I am legitimately afraid that Russia might assassinate elected leaders and invade, and embroil my own country in a war that might lead to my death. And to be honest my worries are a bit overblown in my particular case, it is very unrealistic that this will happen to my particular country, but if I were to live in Poland they wouldn't be.
I raise this point in response to your quotation marks around "security". European countries have very real, and very pressing security concerns.
It's easy to justify snooping. The issue (for me) is when the snooping unjustifiably infringes on my personal privacy. Governments will argue that they don't know that I'm not a threat, so they must surveil me. Unfortunately, those who are doing the surveilling can also be a threat to the people, even when the people are behaving completely in compliance with the law. You need only look at some of the recent revelations in the US press for examples.
Knowledge is power, and power corrupts.
The result is a less-than-optimal network that requires routing communications through a ground station (where it can be intercepted) even when it's technically feasible (and optimal) to use point-to-point communications.
The resulting technical solutions (at least) double the bandwidth and processing required by the network, and bandwidth/processing are critical resources for communications satellites. These requirements can make or break the economic feasibility of a proposed system.