This point is critical to understanding how we ended up here. The weakest points of the Internet or anything that runs on top of it, like the World Wide Web, are the parts that interact with meatspace, ie. once you dig far enough down, you're subject to the whims of a third-party who is either a government, or a private corporation that answers, through laws, to a government.

The interests of these third-parties are different from ours, and they're subject to different pressures. We can talk about transparency and oversight all we want, but any positive progress for 'those of us in the middle' will just be populist concessions for our appeasement.