[mschuster91]

> It's not "our own" government, for any "our own" that purports to include me. It is a junta with enough guns to have their way with people across a continent.

Virtually all governments spy on their and other countries' citizens these days, not just the US. We Germans spy, the Brits and the rest of Five Eyes spy, the Russians spy, the Chinese spy, the Iranians spy and I bet that even North Korea has quite some good hackers.

And for the rest of your comments: indeed, a "new internet" would be required. But as you can see on the adoption rate of IPv6, we're stuck with this mess unless quantum computing forces us to switch.

[stuki]

IPv6 doesn't fundamentally offer end users anything far beyond the current standards.

I'm imagining a protocol for less tightly coupled endpoints could be written to, while the "switches" merely translate traffic to route it on current infrastructure. A more application agnostic version of mixmaster or TOR, so to speak. The important part, is really to get enough of a variety of end user apps written to it, to prevent anyone from knowing much about the traffic simply due to the protocol spoken. Then, over time, to optimize away more and more crud, until we've got dedicated hardware. It may still be a bit utopian, but the current mess isn't really serving people all that well anymore, either.

[icebraining]

Virtually all governments spy on their and other countries' citizens these days

Virtually all governments have ever done so, these days it's just easier.

[stuki]

Which is a pretty good indication that all meaningful solutions to the spying problems, need to work at a level more fundamental than government. Routing around them, or rendering them impotent, by design, if you wish.