Absolutely not! That's precisely why technologists and scientists have always been easily manipulated. Any technology, any technology, can always be turned on its head and abused. If technologists really have the power they've come to believe they possess, it must be used politically. Politics cannot be avoided. Trying to eschew politics is merely following a policy of not caring, and yielding power to those who openly espouse politics.
> Facebook should be a protocol, not a service. Twitter should be a protocol, not a service. And so forth. This of course completely upends the business model these technologies are based on, and would need to be approached by people with a completely different perspective.
Yes! But this could only be done by raising political awareness.
The biggest problem with the internet is not government control. You can see how government control, when exposed (and it will always be exposed as it always has been), creates an uproar. When people are aware and upset, things will be kept in check.
The biggest problem is that articles such as this claim that "US cloud services cannot be trusted" only when government surveillance is in play. But services couldn't have been trusted beforehand. People give up information — and information is power — to private corporations. Those corporations are under far less scrutiny and oversight than the government, but that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that people surrender information voluntarily; possibly because they don't care, and possibly because the corporations have been able, through far more effective propaganda than any government could ever hope to produce, convinced the people that the corporations have their best interest in mind.
The worst form of exploitation happen when people voluntarily surrender power. People actively support the abuse, then they don't mind, and then it may be too late.
The solution must be politics and laws. Just like antitrust laws try to prevent corporations from amassing too much power, so too new information laws must prevent them from doing the same.