@ar.al dude, what are you, a communist? Hehe, the only valid explanation of course :)
But yeah, the US is lost, but we could imagine a future where the rest of us grew governments that could act on their own people's behalf instead of the US big corps.
@ar.al And the sad thing is, this would be so easy to regulate. If you're making medical equipment (especially anything implanted into the body,) you have to submit full and complete documentation, schematics, software, mechanical designs etc into a vault, standards body or even (ghasp!) the state to be given a license to sell this stuff.
While I would of course prefer it to be free and open source all the way, we don't even have to go there. Just some neatral institution that is able to pass on the designs if it at some point becomes necessary. Like a security upgrade to your eyes or heart rate control unit, or something...
@Rysiekúr Memesson To a certain extent, isn't that what they're doing? Tricking people into giving up more information than they are aware of by the lure of "free" services.