Privacy activists are winning fights with tech giants. Why does victory feel hollow? | Evgeny Morozov | The Guardian

Although this looks like someone looking for problems because of the apparent near-future success of "solutionism", some good points here: we need "an institution that will know what ... regulations to suspend (eg libraries and IPR) ... to fully leverage the potential inherent in digital technologies for the public good."

Recent success on privacy protection may be pyrrhic:

• Alphabet to use machine learning to group users into cohorts based on behaviour, and target ads to cohorts
• iOS forces users to agree to be tracked

"Terrorized by ... “surveillance capitalism”, have we made it all too easy for technology companies to actually live up to our expectations?... even the challenge of fake news may prove easier to handle".

Surely this is not a bad thing? Not in itself, but we need to "see through the tech industry’s lip service to innovation, and ask... who is allowed to innovate – and under what conditions – in the current system?"

Today's tech industry's limited imagination precludes other sorts of actors - the digital equivalents of the library, museum, post office (but email?).

"policymakers have surrendered this whole process of discovery to the technology industry" rather than provide the (infra)structures that could facilitate experimentation. And that limits new ideas into the "straitjacket of the startup [whuch]... imposes its own imperatives: users need to be monetized; data needs to be gathered; subscriptions need to be sold".