The Battle for Power on the Internet
"Our e-mail, photos, calendars, address books, messages, and documents are on servers belonging to Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on."That's not a given.  Not only is it trivially easy to host your own email, there are a number of very positive side-effects of doing so.  For instance, when I email my wife, it's just a local copy operation - no network traffic is generated, and thus nothing can be intercepted by third parties.Further, although I have not done it yet, it appears to be only slightly more technically challenging to provide your own dialtone.In 2013 the Internet traffic I actually do generate is much more secure than the Internet traffic I generated 20 years ago.  Now I have a VPN to various endpoints around the globe.  That's much better than telnet to tc.umn.edu :)The disconnect here is that he is talking about particular consumer properties (walled gardens) that happen to exist on the Internet.  It surprises me, given who the author is.