Privacy tools are a start, but real freedom lives in the digital outskirts of the web

Opinion The Net is born free, but everywhere is in chains. This is a parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract where he said the same about humans, but it's nonetheless true. The Net is built out of open, free protocols and open, free code. Yet it and we are bound by the rulemakers who build the services and set the laws of the places we go and the things that we do, not to our advantage.

Enshittification everywhere, and whatcha gonna do about it?

The ground rules of "open" are like any basic technology. Unintended consequences can make enemies of good ideas. One such is "Like it or fork it." There's lots in modern browsers that people don't like, which is unsurprising with all that tasty personal data flowing through them. So people fork them. They remove the parts they don't like ...