They have: Freenet, I2P, Tor... none have ever really taken off, _because_ they can be used to circumvent government monitoring. At the end of the day, we'll submit to panopticon censorship because most of us _want_ panopticon censorship.
A long tail of features that users care about. Devs will ship 1/10th of the total package as free, open source and scratch their heads at why the users don't come to enjoy the freedom. As Steve Jobs said, "Design is how it works." And most of these solutions don't work for the average user.
This is a pretty big claim that I feel bears some explanation as to why you feel that way
Everyone hates the enough to justify anything up to and including public executions.
I have to say this is not my experience at all. In fact I can say I've probably never met anybody who came to that conclusion.
In my experience, most people recognize that, yes, bad people should be caught, but also that widespread surveillance and erosion of privacy is both bad for them and society. The problem arises with the fact that people often have more pressing matters to them - such as feeding their family - so they don't have time or energy to worry about fighting the myriad systemic issues that is needed to fix things on the necessary societal level.
I do not blame people for this, and nor should you; all that does is antagonize people and increases their reticence about politics in general.
So you should continue the discussion like this: those bad people after 24/7 surveillance have no other option to infiltrate the surveillance caste. That's where things will get really hellish.
Sure, it might catch some instances, but at the expense of everyone's privacy?
Basically, the position comes down to: do you want to stop pedophiles, or do you want to make it easier for them to hide?
And yes, you can rationalize all day long about how that's not accurate and this and that, but then your arguing that most people are willing to sift through al the data instead of just going with something that at first glance seems reasonable.
As long as I can still post my lunch on Instagram and explain to LinkedIn how I organize my inbox, I don't mind if the NSA is watching.
If it prevented your ability to speak freely about (and with) the candidates who represent your's and many others' wishes in a democracy, leading you to fear, would it become important to you?
That's what it's being used for.
The way I see it, centralized surveillable services promise lucrative investment returns based on monetizing user data, which attracts capital from the everything bubble seeking anywhere to go, which pays for an overwhelming amount of advertising that fakes social proof. And now that users have been trained to wantonly trust web browsers and shy away from native software, and the surveillance industry business model has been proven out, the situation is quite sticky.