Very interesting. This very topic was hit a number of times at last week's GNU hacker's meeting in Göteborg. If we were to come onto the scene now, as it is, and re-found the GNU project, what would the biggest priority be?

To a number of us, it seems that the priority would be to protect user's data and computing experience from the growing centralization of the web. Something like making distributed web applications, with p2p-distributed asymmetric cryptography replacing behind-the-firewall databases, and apps running in sandboxes on users' machines, in the context of their secrets, replacing e.g. facebook.com.

Someone at the conference said it best: it seems that user freedom is really at odds with the client-server model of computation. The corrolary being that net neutrality is necessary but not sufficient -- we need to increase equality of all nodes in the net, including nodes that are now just "end users".