Give me a break, is this not classic fallacy of making "perfect" the enemy of "better"? With an attitude like that, things never improve.
Privacy protection exists along a gradient. Just because one does not want to sit at the far end with RMS does not mean we just throw up our hands and say "well, I guess I have to give up all my privacy, because I can't do what RMS does."
And as I said, there's still a lot of work to do. So let's get to it and stop the nay-saying!
I'm not arguing that at all - precisely the opposite, in fact. I'm saying that so long as we put privacy in the hands of end users and don't hold service providers responsible (the point I was replying to), we more-or-less cripple our ability to utilize the internet that exists today.
We can use strong end-to-end encryption to evade snooping middlemen. Beyond that, we hold service providers accountable by not using their services if they are not willing or able to provide the security and privacy we require.
If you want an authority to hold them accountable, you are just shifting your trust from one entity you have little/no control over, to another entity that you have little/no control over.
Look around, not up. An authority will not solve this. We must solve it, together.
Privacy protection exists along a gradient. Just because one does not want to sit at the far end with RMS does not mean we just throw up our hands and say "well, I guess I have to give up all my privacy, because I can't do what RMS does."
And as I said, there's still a lot of work to do. So let's get to it and stop the nay-saying!