

Take Back the Internet - anu_gupta
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/take_back_the_i.html

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Mithrandir
Previous discussion (when this essay was published in The Guardian):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336373)

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seiji
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: [http://matt.sh/introducing-
dx](http://matt.sh/introducing-dx)

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.

Ubuntu got people to pay a total of $12 million for a _fantasy phone_. 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.

Can we focus that faith and optimism into funding real problems and get a
paltry five million to fix the entire world?

[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.

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hga
Thwarting the security state's ambitions has much greater risks than plunking
down some money for a "fantasy phone"....

~~~
seiji
"Technology is hard, let's go shopping?"

~~~
hga
Heh. More like "Shopping is fun, and that NSA squirrel isn't really shiny
enough ... yet."

But taken the way you put it, you need to pick your battles, which includes
specifically what and _when_ you fight. Right now I think the odds in the
political arena are good, given the stunning results of the Amash Amendment
vote ... but if that proves to be wrong then perhaps that sometime later, and
in the meanwhile other battles should be a focus, and perhaps none right now
("let's go shopping").

And then there's my bottom line: none of this is risk free. Including doing
nothing, although way too many underestimate the risk of that.

