I literally expressed that Western tech companies can and will hold a proverbial gun to the worlds head to get what they want and you attack me for "singling out China." Okay.

My point was that communications are fucked when they're controlled by centralized powers instead of decentralized and citizen-controlled. Like I said, there isn't a modern country that does this right. They're all draconian fuckheads who want to spy on their populace but have privacy for those in positions of power. It's not the system, it's humans, and it's that kind of shit that you have to face when designing societies (remember the Utopian thinking you brought up?) that when you're centralizing power of any kind, you're creating more opportunities for despotism. Currently, everywhere, all communications are pretty centralized. We don't have lots of rogue communications in most countries, partially because even things like encrypted communications still have to use hardware owned by communications operators to be able to get from Point A to Point B. I'm just interacting with Lemmy, but on the way back and forth, my data passes through all kinds of privately-owned infrastructure that I have no control over.

Once again, this is why I think communications are currently neck and neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding how their function changes society and alienates us from each other.