Whatever else 2013 will be remembered for, it will be known as the year in which a courageous whistleblower brought home to us the extent to which the most liberating communications technology since printing has been captured.Although Edward Snowden’s revelations initially seemed only to document the extent to which the state had exploited internet technology to create a surveillance system of unimaginable comprehensiveness, as the leaks flowed it gradually dawned on us that our naive lust for “free” stuff online had also enabled commercial interests effectively to capture the internet for their own purposes.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/internet-corporate-surveillance