In Europe (at least the UK), it's usually the big companies that are viewed with more suspicion than the governments. I don't think anyone felt that BigCo was ever 'like you and me'.
While, like many, I am appalled at the NSA's supposed massive-scale surveillance, I fear surveillance by corporations like Google much more. The fact that people share their most private information with Google voluntarily actually makes it worse. If you want to know where real power lies, look for power that is not only feared, but loved (say, your mother :)). Many people have referred to the book 1984 in the past week, but they've all missed one crucial point: Big Brother is not feared; he is loved. At the end of the book, Winston voluntarily subjugates himself to Big Brother. He loves Big Brother.
As long as the NSA has some form of oversight, however dysfunctional -- as long as government is at least suspect -- we'll be fine. But the much bigger danger is Google itself, the power that people love; that they voluntarily subjugate themselves to. It seems that Americans, perhaps because their government was formed not from feudalism, but as a rebellion against a foreign central government -- are very much aware of the dangers of government, but are blind to the much bigger threat of feudalism.
Feudal lords were the government. A centralised one, too, with a king or some other emperor at the top.
Democratic governments are not protecting you from the feudal ones any more than your ISP protects you from the telephone company.
A centralized government tries to have a monopoly on power, in the sense that it can limit the power any citizen, or a group of citizens, can have. Of course, some governments may choose to limit power selectively, and allow some individuals, or small groups, obtain almost as much power as feudal lords. But it's the democratic government's duty to protect us from feudal lords -- in fact it's the only weapon we have against feudalism -- so there's a fine balance to strike between a government that's despotic and one that allows feudalism to flourish.
Systems built around direct coercion, with the threat of violence, are rarely stable. Successful exploitation is one whose targets either hardly feel or one that's not bad enough to get them to rebel. The way these systems often collapse is that over time, the exploiters feel more confident to exploit even more, until they reach a breaking point at which a rebellion occurs.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism
[2]: http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ch...
But you're right that in many other regions/periods, peasants were formally free, and legally able to live anywhere they wanted, as long as they reached an arrangement with the landowner (otherwise, of course, it would be trespassing). Since the land was all owned by a smallish number of landowners, the only way to make a living if you were not one of them was to work someone else's land, on terms largely dictated by them, so economics effectively tied peasants to the manorial lord.
I'll see if I can dig up the source, but I read an interesting analysis specifically of the transition to feudalism in late-Roman Italy. As the pax Romana weakened, the city of Rome was increasingly unable to be kept supplied with food imported through smoothly functioning trade routes (especially grain from North Africa), so much of the population fled the city for the countryside. There, they had little choice but to reach generally unfavorable agreements with estate owners for permission to work on their land, since Italy was already too densely populated for American-style frontier homesteading in unclaimed land to be possible.
Every time you choose not to use Google search, you know you're gonna have to work harder to get good results, and use some amount of will power. Since most people search the Web a lot, the totality of it is quite a large effort and will power. Our society is filled with such choices, be it food, consumerism, cigarettes, etc. Since will power is finite, people will always lose on some of this choices.
Also if you really want to stop being tracked, you need some technical understanding and some cooperation from other people and you need will lose some important capabilities in society.
This makes the choice even harder.
You can choose not to give your information to Google or Facebook. That people have decided to do it anyway, says more about people than it does about those companies.
When you have a central authority (government), you can't opt-out, without being subjected punitive measures. Google can't put you in jail or fine you for failing to use their search engine, or their email service.
Well, yes, but if this is a result of some common form of human weakness, Google is exploiting that weakness. Obviously, anyone seeking power will try to exploit whatever weakness they can find in those they try to gain power over. Both sides of the equation are "natural". It is therefore the government's duty to try and prevent that.
One can argue that, sure. But Google does not have a monopoly in their field. They may be the best, by some measures, but there are choices, and those choices include the ability to use someone else's services (or no one's)
>Obviously, anyone seeking power will try to exploit whatever weakness they can find in those they try to gain power over. Both sides of the equation are "natural". It is therefore the government's duty to try and prevent that.
We can't exempt government itself from the dynamics of power and how it affects people. The problem I see here is that, when the checks and balances that are supposed to rein in government abuses fail, we're in trouble. You can walk away from Google's services, but that level of choice doesn't exist when we're talking about government.
A monopoly isn't required for this kind of exploitation. A feudal system can have quite a few lords.
> The problem I see here is that, when the checks and balances that are supposed to rein in government abuses fail, we're in trouble.
Absolutely. We must try to keep democracy itself working in order for it to be able to save us from feudalism. I'd even argue that a government with failing checks and balances is also one more likely to let feudalism grow.
> You can walk away from Google's services, but that level of choice doesn't exist when we're talking about government.
With this I disagree. Well, I agree with the second part, of course, but I don't think people can walk away from Google (and not straight into the hands of another Google). The option exists in theory, and some people who care about privacy will walk away, but the majority won't because the "Google option" is so tempting. I care a lot about privacy, and yet I use Google's services because, honestly, I can't be bothered not too. But I do think Google must be broken up and/or come under heavy regulation.
Most forms of exploitation are not overt. Many of them don't seem to hurt that much - at least at first. If they did, the people will rebel. Most forms of exploitation lull you into submission, always providing you with the theoretical option to "walk away at any time".
Unlike Europe, the US also has a significant subpopulation that views the government suspiciously. This is not an opposing narrative - this group also tends to be suspicious of corporations, particularly the large corporations that collude with the government.