It is far more open now than it has ever been. Anyone can launch their own web app/site for a few dollars a month. Anyone can affordably build and scale the next Facebook, Google, Youtube on cloud technologies.
And people are far more free to find platforms where they can say what the want and do what they want e.g. Tor.
Instead people are more entitled. They deserve for their content to be on the websites they like. They deserve the huge amounts of traffic that they had no help in creating. They deserve to be featured in algorithms that ruin the reputation of the website. They deserve to spread their propaganda.
1. Retail ISPs 2. Physical backbone/infrastructure providers 3. service & content providers (Facebook, Netflix, twitter etc)
We’ve seen centralization across all three areas as the market demand has outstripped our ability to supply open access standards in any given area. You’d need government-supported decentralization of all three areas to make it harder to censor or surveil, which is in no government’s interest.
The Great Firewall of China allows proliferation of #1 and #3 but provides mass surveillance and censorship via #2. As an aside, It’s really funny to interact with Chinese servers, I deployed a virtual host web server once via wildcard DNS, and it was like rolling the dice for any given dynamic hostname if the firewall decided that hostname needed to be censored or not, regardless of the content being the same.
Snowden also showed that the USA also does mass surveillance (just not censorship) via the network.
The only approach to discourage mass censorship and surveillance is extreme decentralization enforced by law: open access networks, widespread end to end cryptography, and a renewed investment in web architecture and technology to incentivize open activities. IMO the technological and usability failure of Tim Bernard Lee’s Semantic Web drive has been the root of the rise of the Facebooks of the world.