Previous discussion (when this essay was published in The Guardian): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336373" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336373</a>
We definitely can "take back the internet," [1] but it will take time, concerted distributed efforts, and focus. I wrote a rant about how we've been caught with our collective pants down recently: <a href="http://matt.sh/introducing-dx" rel="nofollow">http://matt.sh/introducing-dx</a><p>My approach is more "get funding so a few dozen smart people can live and focus 100% on fixing things" rather than letting people just play around on nights and weekends.<p>Ubuntu got people to pay a total of $12 million for a <i>fantasy phone</i>. A phone. People's lives are so empty they will pay for things that don't exist in the hopes it makes them happier at some unspecified date in the future.<p>Can we focus that faith and optimism into funding real problems and get a paltry five million to fix the entire world?<p>[1]: The world is a lot bigger than the Internet — there's much we need to set back on track in addition to Internet stewardship.