Wave Farewell to the World Wide Web?

[Carsten Wiethoff]

I agree that decentralising away from the US is a useful first step. But still many fundamental problems do exist. As long as states like the US and Britain apply different standards to their own citizens and to foreigners (basically no rights to foreigners) and on the other hand share their data, nobody has any rights in the internet. And given the current state of encryption technology and the NSA's ability to break it, nobody can be sure that their encrypted communication cannot be listened to. So, like in telephony, sensitive data cannot be exchanged and this will have profound longterm effects on the behaviour of governments, corporations and simple people. I expect more private networks being built, completely seperate from the internet, using very strong encryption where the use of public lines like satellite links or sea cables is unavoidable.
The only way I could envision for the internet to become trustworthy again would be a strong enforceable international law giving privacy rights to all people, enforced internationally standardized strong encryption for all data AND a massive downsizing of the NSA and comparable organisations worldwide. The trend is in the opposite direction.