• My question is this: why is any of this inevitable?

    At what point have we gained freedoms and reduced government control over the internet since OpenPGP broke the international ban on cryptography? I only remember a downward curve.

    Maybe it’ll take 50 years, maybe it’ll take 5, but I haven’t seen any attempt at all to protect end-to-end encryption by law. There have only been attacks on it. The EU’s upload filter made it into law, intelligence services are gaining more and more power to tap the internet all over the world, and gen-Z’s perception of privacy will let the big corporations win. The boomers and older gen-X’ers who don’t understand the internet are easily swayed with “think of the children” and gen-Z didn’t grow up with the core concept of privacy that previous generations knew.