No matter which side you’re on. If you see any politician today as terrible or any government policies as tyrannical then you should think twice about only allowing the government to own all the guns.

Well you still haven’t addressed the most important problem that I’ve mentioned which is the fact currently no one seems to want to watch these news and that’s why they are asking for government funding in the first place. Consumers clearly wants corporate news for whatever reason. What’s the point in funding something that no one wants? This is a chicken and egg problem, if most people in the country actually wants unbiased source of news then they will seek for such sources over the biased ones. As a result advertisers would change their behaviour to favour news that’s more unbiased. Unfortunately people has voted with their viewership that they don’t actually want unbiased news, but ones that are scary, outrageous, or tells them exactly what they want to hear. I can’t see how adding more government funding to the equation is gonna change people’s behaviour.

Government funded news are not inherently unbiased. But hypothetically let’s say it is unbiased. The whole reason why a bailout is needed in the first place is because not enough people voluntarily watches these news. Is the next step to ban all other sources of news and make government news the only source of information? That doesn’t sound like a great path to venture down to.

Keep in mine not everyone uses TOR to evade the three letter agencies. I’m a TOR relay operator and the main reason I’m running it is to give people in oppressive regimes a better chance at exchanging free information. To these people getting spied on by western intelligence agencies is probably the lesser evil compared to their own tinpot dictatorship governments.

Another main reason why I took off my hat back then was because I was a broke college kid with garbage internet speed and my only computer was a laptop. Torrenting shows sometimes means I need to have my laptop on for days. Now I have an entire homelab setup with a dedicated VM on one of my servers for torrenting and I can afford fast internet. I was pleasantly surprised how efficiently I can torrent when I got back sailing recently.

They already do this. I was offered to plug some kind of monitoring device into my car for a period of time to determine my driving behavior for potential lower rates. I went for higher rates.

As someone who works in the tech industry. I can tell you people here are not tech illiterate, but most just dgaf about privacy when they can trade it in for convenience. That’s why most of them are okay with designing apps that have zero respect to user privacy and they see nothing wrong with it.

Some malicious users do use VPNs to send spams and many websites automatically bans these IPs. Normally switching to a different VPN server will resolve the issue.

I wouldn’t call going from mad profits to okay profits a sign of downfall. Having decentralized technology doesn’t mean decentralization will actually happen. For instance look at E-mail. It is technically a decentralized service, but most people still uses services provided by big tech vs operating their own servers. Such a system does give you more choices, but don’t expect this future will be without big tech.

Then you need both anonymity and privacy. Sometimes you do need both but they’re not the same concept.

Privacy without anonymity is you using the bathroom with everyone seeing you walking in. They know you used the bathroom but have no idea what you did inside.

Anonymity without privacy is like you pissing on the street with a ski mask on. Everyone saw what you did but no one knows who you are.

Having both is walking into the bathroom with a ski mask on. No one knows who you are nor what you did inside.