There are huge economic interests driving the tremendous advancements in mobile computing hardware and software. The same economic interests are leading to creation of things like private-access-tokens and web env integrity as a way to differentiate themselves and to protect their business models from external existential attacks on them.
The alternative economic business models have been applied to build open-source hardware and software stacks that preserve this sense of digital freedom. But the result is a stack with vastly inferior capabilities and experiences.
Now, someone can demand I want the capabilities and experience of the former with my notion of digital freedom. But unfortunately there's no economic model that would make that work and there aren't enough users who care deeply enough about this to create the economic motivation needed to force the change.
Most voluminous usage of Internet by most number of humans is not via web browser anymore. It is via mobile apps. This means more restrictive and intrusive things than WEI have already happened and they haven't noticed or didn't care.
In the late 2000s, we built a strong cryptography based privacy preserving secure mesh network and node software for organizing and sharing your personal digital collections (photos, videos, emails, documents, messages etc) and got no traction in the market. Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects. A few years later unencrypted cloud backups and cloud hosted personal data services became not only normal and accepted but actually preferred and so we gave up on our vision. (We also got a nice and tidy exit via acquisition). Many years later, after many data breaches, Snowden revelations etc, some of us thought people would care now, but alas no, they still don't. Without this basic economic motive force, any such attempt to fight against this will miserably fail.
> Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects
Do people care about the privacy and security of their homes?
They obviously do.
Now why would the same people not care about the digital privacy and security of their homes?
Maybe they are incoherent idiots. That is certainly part of the explanation.
But maybe, just maybe, nobody credible and on a high enough podium ever warned them their digital homes are being pilfered with gusto. That, indeed, all sorts of valuables are taken from them, except they are intangible.
Your arguments about economic model viability are right, except they are not. Economic models follow laws and regulations. If you mandate that digital privacy is a right and its violation is theft, then there will be a viable industry built around that.
The shape of the tech industry is increasingly determined by political views rather than economic or technical constraints.
The alternative economic business models have been applied to build open-source hardware and software stacks that preserve this sense of digital freedom. But the result is a stack with vastly inferior capabilities and experiences.
Now, someone can demand I want the capabilities and experience of the former with my notion of digital freedom. But unfortunately there's no economic model that would make that work and there aren't enough users who care deeply enough about this to create the economic motivation needed to force the change.
Most voluminous usage of Internet by most number of humans is not via web browser anymore. It is via mobile apps. This means more restrictive and intrusive things than WEI have already happened and they haven't noticed or didn't care.
In the late 2000s, we built a strong cryptography based privacy preserving secure mesh network and node software for organizing and sharing your personal digital collections (photos, videos, emails, documents, messages etc) and got no traction in the market. Nobody cared about the privacy and security aspects. A few years later unencrypted cloud backups and cloud hosted personal data services became not only normal and accepted but actually preferred and so we gave up on our vision. (We also got a nice and tidy exit via acquisition). Many years later, after many data breaches, Snowden revelations etc, some of us thought people would care now, but alas no, they still don't. Without this basic economic motive force, any such attempt to fight against this will miserably fail.