An Internet that is completely decentralized and independent of gatekeepers is the only long-term hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that.

There are too many powerful, vested interests in controlling people and their communication to let that happen. The only reason the Internet was ever as free as it was that it slipped under the radar of those very interests and wasn't taken seriously enough at first. So its users had a decade or two of relative freedom that's now steadily being chipped away.